


Three Missing Girls in Madison, Wisconsin

by lapsi



Series: Case-By-Case [1]
Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Holden Ford Whump, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Period-Typical Homophobia, Schizophrenia, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-05-18 21:11:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 62,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14860376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: In 1967, a 19 year old Holden Ford was arrested for the murder of a five year old girl. Ten years later, Agent Bill Tench assists local law enforcement's efforts to locate the bodies of the three other linked disappearances.Now Bill is stuck interviewing the arrogant son of a bitch, who just won't shut up about who he thinksreallycommitted the four murders.





	1. Chapter 1

“Cigarette?”  
  
“If you’re offering,” Holden Ford says. He takes it deftly, the chain between his wrists scraping the table, and sits back. As Bill starts to extend the lighter, Holden is already settling it into the breast pocket of the loose, off-white uniform. “Oh, no thank you, I don’t smoke.”  
  
_Is this asshole serious?_ Bill lights up his own cigarette. He monitors his breathing in a mangled impersonation of yogic exercises. Rage huffs out in a tart mouthful of cigarette smoke. It dissipates in curls, winding organically up around the fluorescent light overhead. The phantasmic shapes are entirely disparate to the harsh angles and merciless illumination of the makeshift interrogation room. Bill had asked the orderlies to bring some chairs and a table into one of the solitary confinement cells. He figured it would unbalance Ford, with the amount of time the young man has spent in solitary. He senses no vulnerability opposite him.  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a tremor from the man partnered with him for this interview. Not fear. Withheld amusement. Detective Quentin Ziezel, of who helms up homicide in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s wilier than Bill initially gave him credit for when they spoke after the BSU training slideshow. Not to mention dogged. It’s technically Bill’s day off, and he’s not at the golf course he’d had his sights set upon. It has him moody enough without some wisecracking wunderkind murderer taking his fucking cigarettes as barter. If he gets antsy so soon, he’ll blow this whole thing. 

“I keep my vices purchasable over the counter,” he says, with an injection of humor. He’s heard Holden Ford has some pretty strong opinions on law enforcement. If he’s keeping score, having one over the FBI agent will loosen him up. Make him less combative. Not exactly a steep price, the nickel or so that one cigarette costs.  
  
Ford doesn’t respond to the quip except to blink dismissively. Bill will have to watch the ground he gives. Too much humor, too much leeway, and there’ll be no firm purchase beneath him if he wants to pivot to intimidation.  
  
“Though I guess you don’t get to purchase so much over the counter. What does one cigarette buy you on the inside?”  
  
Holden raises one eyebrow as deliberately as an arching cat. “The FBI came to interview me about intraprison market dynamics?”  
  
“Of course not, Holden,” Bill replies, the thinnest powder of condescension clinging to the name. “I’m not _the_ FBI. I’m an agent, sure. But I’m just assisting Detective Ziezel here.” It’s true, and not true. This isn’t a real interrogation. Bill is here to diagnose Holden’s susceptibilities to various interview techniques. Ford isn’t going to crack in one sitting. He’s had years of interrogations from law enforcement. Bill isn’t even the first FBI agent to interview him. He never met Agent Tenston, but he’d met Ron Waits, and knew him to be a highly competent and efficient interrogator. They’d spent weeks working on Ford after his arrest, on the exact assignment Ziezel is pursuing a whole decade later. They got nothing out of him. 

Holden Ford’s single confession had come before he was even arrested, at barely any prompting from the two local traffic cops who had pulled him over for erratic driving near the abduction site of one of the missing girls. His license was expired, which tenuously covered grounds for the arrest. One of the two had later shared she’d considered not even turning on the tape recorder for the questioning. Holden claimed that he couldn't even remember confessing to Missy Rupert’s murder.

Ford turns to Ziezel. Bill expected outward dislike, but observes a receptive calmness about the imprisoned man. So, it’s not law enforcement he hates, just the ones who managed to nail him. Ziezel moved from a New York to Madison too late to hunt Holden Ford; now he has to settle for trying to locate the bodies of three long-dead girls.

One victim’s corpse was unearthed in Devil’s Lake State Park, when the disturbed earth was luckily spotted by a park ranger. The grave was just over five feet deep, the little body swathed in black garbage bags and lines of yellowy clear duct tape. If the same diligence went into disposing of his three earlier victims, they’ll need exact directions to the graves. Five feet deep is a serious dig for even one site. Let alone trying to grid search the whole of Devil’s Lake. Bill knows that there’s been plenty of unsuccessful searches in the area, and he’s not surprised. It’s a damn miracle the one body turned up, and there’s no guarantee that there’s any more to be found in that park. There’s a national forest barely three hours drive out of Madison. Missy Ruperts’ disappearance was reported as a kidnapping within an hour, while the other abductions had been reported hours later, and in the case of Jessica Roe, a full day. Bill has posited that the body disposal at Devil’s Lake was Ford at his least organized. It’s an unnerving thought, and bodes ill for law enforcement’s search efforts.

As if hearing his thoughts, Holden speaks. “I would like nothing more than to see those three girls delivered home to their grieving families, Detective. But I can’t help with that,” Holden tells the policeman in picture perfect sincerity. “I’ve already told you I can’t.”  
  
Bill had seen the mugshots of Ford. The change is uncanny. He’d been uncomfortably skinny, overgrown hair falling into his eyes, that peeked through bulging and bloodshot. He’d only been nineteen. Nobody really looks like themselves at nineteen. Especially not someone in the grips of untreated psychosis. Now, Ford is medicated back to the All-American boy, aside for the clammy lividity of undersunned skin. Handsome, with broad shoulders for his slight figure, well-groomed in his neat uniform. Bill knows he’s twenty-nine from the file. He could be five years younger. He looks like a vintage World War II recruitment poster, warm vivid colours surrendered to the passing years. He wonders what the consequences would have been if Ford had been medicated before he started his career in murdering little girls. It would be hard to suspect the put-together young man in front of him of murder, that’s for sure. He and Ziezel are warned with foreknowledge of the mind beneath the manicured mask.

Ziezel is less tactful than Bill had hoped: “You know you’re never leaving this facility. There are no negative consequences if you talk, Ford. I just don’t see what you’re holding out for.”  
  
Holden’s perfect composure slips right before his eyes, in an asymmetrical flinch of annoyance. Ziezel’s perfectly correct. This murderer has already had every enticement and every threat levelled against him. Still, the approach is predictable.  
  
Bill wonders if Ford is genuinely frustrated, or just an easily bored psychopath.  
  
Ford’s gaze cuts the detective off entirely. “Do you have some new interrogation strategy you’d like to try on me?” He asks Bill. “Cutting edge psychological methodology you’ve got lined up to crack me? Bringing in the crying mother is a bust. They pulled that back in ‘72, dragged in Jessica’s mom and guess what? My story didn’t change one iota. You picked a pretty soundproof room, if you want to get the phonebook. I’m not going to falter in one step. Because I’m telling the goddamn truth,” he finishes, jerky with restraint.  
  
“Jessica’s?” Tench echoes, unperturbed. Ford is being very self-righteous for a man who has already confessed to murdering a child.  
  
Holden seems bothered by the detail latched upon. “That was her name.”  
  
“Was? You’re sure she’s dead?”  
  
“That seems pretty evident. The same beige station wagon was seen in the vicinity of three abductions, Jessica's included. One of the girls abducted turned up dead. Nothing suggests to me that the others avoided the same awful fate.”  
  
Ziezel doesn’t let that one slide. “That would be your mother’s Ford Falcon?”  
  
Holden’s frown deepens. “Her car was brown.”  
  
“Tan, I’d say. And pretty faded, huh, Ford?”

Holden rolls his eyes at what must be another familiar conversation. He still only has eyes for the FBI agent. “Let’s say, I’m the killer. I’m the sort of meticulous type to drive out and bury my victim in a deep grave, in the middle of a forest. Say the forensic reenactment the prosecutors described in the trial are exactly right. I poured lye over the bodies to speed decomposition, I wore gloves to make sure I didn’t fingerprint the bags or tape I wrapped the body in, then I diligently cleaned every goddamn trace of those girls out of that car, and disposed of the murder weapon somewhere you still haven’t found it. Say, that’s the kind of person I am. Methodical, paranoid, intelligent. Why would I use my mother’s car? Why would I kidnap a girl who lives two houses down from me?”  
  
“That’s pretty good, Holden. Maybe you should have represented yourself in court,” Bill says. He’s done with his cigarette, and with the interview. He hates this smug prick, feeding off the grief he’s still causing to this world.  
  
Holden seems to sense the impending departure. He leans in. “He’s a cop.” 

Ziezel reacts to the accusation with distaste. “Is he, now.”  
  
“I’ve been doing some research. After Jessica Roe's disappearance, the McBride family’s church had held one of those ‘Stranger Danger’ talks for the kids of the congregation. She was taken off a suburban street. If she’d been screaming and fighting, someone would have heard it. She went willingly. And she wouldn’t have gone with just anyone.”  
  
“What do you mean, you’ve been doing research?” Ziezel cuts in. “Were you at her church?”  
  
“I don’t go to church, as you well know,” Ford says snippily.  
  
Holden had made a smartass remark about swearing on the bible during his trial. A throwaway line that had been pounced upon by court reporters. The atheist child murderer. Almost better to be a Satanist. At least then he would get a couple of rock’n’roll songs written after him. Holden Ford, on the whole, didn’t help himself one bit during his trial. Equal parts unstable, and arrogant.  
  
His attitude didn’t tip the scales, though. The evidence had already dragged the balance beam down immovably deep in Holden’s guilt. Hell, the evidence might as well have broken the scales in two it was that damning. Bill has no illusions about Holden’s attempt to implicate the police. He’s claimed evidence tampering before, now he is simply cementing a motive for such.  
  
“And that’s enough to make you think it was a cop? Could have lied to her. Hell, could have knocked up a fake police badge. She was, what? Five and spare change? I think you’re smart enough to get a _five_ _year old_ into your car,” Ziezel prompts.

Bill can see Ford’s jaw working in annoyance. He’s not going to fall for any of these easy baits, and Ziezel doesn’t expect him to.  
  
“What if it was someone she knew?” Bill asks, folding his arms. He doesn’t like playing with Ford’s guilt-absolving hypotheticals, but he’s curious to see how far Holden has gone into calculation.  
  
Holden is all calm rationality at once. “The police department would have caught a person connecting the girls. They lived miles from each other. So, I take it you mean he knew just Ellie-Anne. Broke his pattern of abducting strangers, which seems unlike everything else we know about how paranoid he was with his crimes. How many men, aged twenty to thirty-five, does a five year old know?”  
  
“That’s awfully specific, Holden,” Ziezel chides.  
  
Holden’s well-timed impassive stare is as sarcastic as an eye roll. He continues with smug disregard. “Sorry. How many men, aged fifteen to forty, does a five year old know? Her dad. Male extended family members. A couple of her kindergarten friends’ dads. A neighbour or two. Maybe someone from church. It’s a short list, and I’d be willing to bet that the police went right through it when she first went missing. If there was anything suspicious there, I would never have been zeroed in on as the guilty party.”  
  
Bill pretends to think about it.  
  
“He wouldn’t have abducted someone he knew,” Holden reiterates.

“Well, I think that’s about all we have time for today,” Ziezel says, barely concealing his annoyance. He collects his papers, and straightens up, already calling for a guard. Bill picks his suit jacket up off the chair and follows.  
  
Holden’s head has dipped a little. His lips are bright white underneath his teeth. There’s a tremble in his hand. The despair is achingly realistic. Bill recalls that Holden had wanted to submit a straight not guilty plea at his trial. He’d been overruled by the court, and ended up with an insanity defense. Hadn’t been a hard sell, with Holden’s erratic behaviour and purported memory loss, family history of mental illness, and the concrete diagnosis of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. His borderline delusional insistence on pleading not guilty had probably helped his cause. Not that it made much difference, Bill has to admit. Prison or secure mental health facility. A life sentence either way.  
  
Bill has a horrible moment of doubt, that Holden might be legitimately delusional.

 

 

“Son of a bitch,” Ziezel says, deep in one of his files. They’re still parked outside the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, but Quentin is yet to start the car.  
  
“Huh?” Bill responds, craning his neck over.  
  
“Interview with Caitlyn Roe day of the disappearance. Ellie-Anne’s mom. She mentions the ‘Stranger Danger’ talk. How did that bastard know about it?”  
  
Bill is lighting a cigarette. The mental hospital looks deceptively low security from the outside. It could be a college dorm, with its faded red bricks and the rolling grassy slopes surrounding. “He mighta been there.”  
  
The detective shakes his head, creases nestled deep into his dark brows. He pulls open another folder, thumbing through it carefully. “Holden was released from hospital the day before her disappearance. Been on suicide watch. ...can’t believe they let him out,” Quentin adds, shaking his head.  
  
“Some medical licenses should've definitely been revoked over that decision,” Bill says under his breath, rolling down a window to flick ash. The failed hanging. He’d always assumed it had to do with guilt, but the timing is off. Maybe he was doing his best to protect a kid from what wanted to do to them. He tastes bile in the back of his throat. “You think he read this transcript?”  
  
“First time he’s brought it up. Wasn’t in discovery during trial. Might have to see about getting his phone-call privileges revoked. Sure seems like he’s harassing the family of one of his victims.” Ziezel flicks through the files agitatedly. “So, Bill. I’m in the fucking doldrums here. What’s my angle?”  
  
“You’re not gonna like what I have to say. You’ve got two tools here. Sympathy, and time. You’re gonna have to listen, relentlessly, to this psycho bullshitting you, and wait out some tidbit of useful information. Holden Ford is not gonna have a conversation that doesn’t benefit Holden Ford. You’re gonna have to gently feed him the rope to hang himself.”

Quentin seems exhausted by the mere idea. He places the files on the back seat, starts the car. He speaks only once they’ve cleared security, and are on the open road. “Okay.”  
  
Bill admires the man sitting across from him. This case doesn’t get much in the way of publicity any more. This mission is for the benefit of the girl’s families, not for any personal laurels. Tench smokes and thinks. “When I’ve needed expert help on criminal psychology, I’ve gone to Doctor Wendy Carr. She’s smart as a tack, really gets into the heads of these sort of men. I’ll see if I can get her opinion on Ford. No guarantees. She might not have the time.”  
  
“I’m grateful as hell for what you’ve done already, Bill,” Ziezel says. He has a warm smile, crinkling up his eyes to merry lines. “Can’t believe that fucker just took your cigarette like that.”  
  
“I think that’s the closest thing to a good omen that interview could have offered us.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“He’s cocky. And you know what cocky people do? They fuck up. They dig graves off fire trails where rangers find them, they kidnap their neighbours, and they talk too fucking much in interviews,” Bill says decisively, flicking ash out of the whirlwind car window.


	2. Chapter 2

“What a fascinating case,” Wendy says by way of greeting. It’s barely three days since she begrudgingly told Bill to send over the files on Holden Ford, hedging as to whether she could get to it before the month was out. Consulting on murder cases must beat grading dissertations.  
  
Bill pushes aside paperwork, collecting a notepad. The first couple of times Wendy consulted on cases, he just listened intently, and walked away knowing he could only remember half of the salient points she’d made.  
  
“I tell you, I see plenty of cases. People are always dragging me in for an opinion. I do my best to be useful, come on home to Virginia, and leave it behind me in the capable hands of the local boys. This case just refused to stay in Wisconsin. It followed me home like a stray dog, and now it's pissing in the corner of my office while I try to concentrate.”  
  
Wendy exhales with a contained laugh. “Are those your official interview notes you sent me?”  
  
“Christ, no. Personal memo just for you. I don’t use the word ‘snot-nosed’ in official reports.”  
  
“I hoped not. Are you busy?”  
  
“No. I’m all ears.”  
  
“Alright, then. I suppose I’ll try to cover only what I cannot see otherwise in the materials.”  
  
Bill leans back in his chair, spinning the pen between his fingers. “Okay.”

“I’m no lawyer, but I am a psychologist, and I have testified in court before as an expert witness. The psychologists who spoke for the prosecution, and the defense, both wildly misrepresented Holden Ford’s mental state insofar as I can diagnose him.”  
  
“You don’t think he’s--” he cuts off the word crazy, knowing Wendy won’t like it. “Suffering from schizophrenia? Memory issues?”  
  
“He is almost certainly suffering from schizophrenia. The memory issues are debatable. I’ll go into that. That was not the misrepresentation. The defence spoke of a delusional motive for his murders that would be eradicated by treatment. The psychologist assisting testified that Holden Ford had resisted treatment at every turn, had stoked his own insanity, and could never safely integrate with society again. Both missed the crucial point here, or perhaps did not want to admit the crucial point: Holden Ford did not murder these children because he was mentally ill. Holden Ford was _caught_ because he was mentally ill. If it hadn’t been for his mental vulnerability in the form of psychosis, there’s no telling how many more murders he would have commited.”  
  
Bill hums in agreement. “You think he’s a pedophile?”  
  
“I really should talk to him before a concrete diagnosis. But on what I’ve been given, yes, I do.”  
  
“The victim who turned up didn’t show signs of sexual abuse.”  
  
“He need not perform a sexual act to derive sexual satisfaction from the murder,” Wendy counters. “I think it also explains his relentless assertion of innocence.”  
  
“Doesn’t want a prison shiv between his ribs?”  
  
“No-- he-- no, I was talking about the immense shame that I suspect he feels. He’s probably become so accustomed to lying that it feels nearly truthful to him. Given a choice, who wouldn't want to live as an innocent man, rather than a murderous pedophile.”

Bill makes a note. “So you don’t think there’s any chance of a him having committed the murders unaware? The defense’s psych mentioned a... 'fugue state'?”  
  
“Fugue _states_ , it would have to be. At least four to cover the murders. No, I don’t think so. Perhaps there is some mental disassociation when he is committing the crimes, but his murders seem preplanned, methodical. He would have had to drive himself out to dispose of the body, spend hours purposefully digging, and then drive back to his home. In all the cases of fugue states I’ve read into, that would be next to impossible. Furthermore, Holden Ford doesn’t claim to have any memory loss at the times of the murders. He gives vivid, yet unverifiable alibis. Now, his confession, I would describe that as a fugue state. He was erratic and disorganized, and at times in his confession, appears dazed and responds intermittently to auditory hallucinations as if questions were spoken by the police interviewing him. This truly is a person unaware of their own actions.”  
  
Tench thinks about that for awhile. “Guess I should be glad he hated doctors, or I’d be consulting in on a case of twenty or so dead kids instead of four.”  
  
“Do you know why he didn’t want to be medicated?”  
  
“I could guess.”  
  
“You’d be wrong, Bill,” Wendy corrects gently.  
  
“He thought the doctors were poisoning him.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“He thought it was dampening his creative spark.”  
  
“Bill, would you let me--” she begins to chide, though Bill can hear her smiling. “Fine, my fault for being coy. He wanted to be an FBI agent.”

 “An _FBI agent_ ? Was that in the files?”  
  
“No. I did some of my own research. I wanted to delve into his relationships with family. Turns out only his mother was in the picture, but I’ll get to that. Holden Ford decided at the age of… hmm, eight or nine that he wanted to be a federal agent, according to his mother. He’d read a book on the Bureau’s investigation into the Gambino crime family. Took a very active interest in crimes, especially violent murders. He had lofty career aspirations. When he began experiencing symptoms in his late teenage years, he began using the medication that his mother hated taking. That was a simpler abstention. She said it made her too tired. She was very asymptomatic, apparently in remission. He self-diagnosed, correctly, and began to suppress his own symptoms with her unfilled scripts. I think he believed his illness would be just as manageable.”  
  
“Why not just go to a doctor?”  
  
“Because a significant mental illness on his medical transcript would undoubtedly prevent him from realizing his childhood dream,” Wendy finishes. “That’s extrapolation. He’s never claimed as much. These sort of offenders are attracted to positions in law enforcement, if you’ll pardon the possible sleight. It’s a common symptom of lust for power.” She’s quiet for a moment. “I pulled this all from an interview a local paper ran with Eileen Ford a few months before her death. I’ve never understood the standoffishness with casting aspersions on the dead, and I’m not going to dull my opinions on this woman. She was deeply emotionally abusive, throughout Holden’s entire life. Possibly it went further than just emotional. He escaped her, briefly, when he moved to Madison for university. She followed, demanded he take care of her. He allowed her to move into his rented apartment, dropped out. Works at a gas station. His first recorded suicide attempt comes three months into cohabitation. Less than a year in, he commits his first murder.”

“You think she was that bad?”  
  
“And I quote, ‘I knew from the moment he came out of me that there was something wrong with him. I saw something dark in him. In his eye. He didn’t cry, he screamed. Just like his dad. He would wake me up for the spite of it. He didn’t have an ounce of sympathy in his whole body.’ That was in court. She testified for the prosecution, with Holden sitting opposite. Imagine talking that way about an infant. Even after all the facts had emerged.”  
  
“Has is occurred to you that she might’ve been exactly right about him?” Bill asks, frowning into the telephone. “So, Holden blames his mom for his psychological issues. Most of ‘em do.”  
  
“He hasn’t said a bad word about her to the press. Before or after her death. I accessed his middle school records--”  
  
“You don’t halfass your research, huh?”  
  
She’s quiet on the other end, maybe self-conscious. “I was looking for disciplinary actions. Hurting other kids, making threats of violence. Early childhood indicators. You know, he had partial records at eight different schools? Moved around a lot. And I wasted my entire day chasing them all up. I found one single blemish on his record, when he was caught auctioning off his completed homework. For lunch money. His mother wasn’t working much. I doubt there was food at home.”

 “So, he had a shitty childhood,” Bill says begrudgingly. “Plenty of people do it tough, and don’t end up killing little girls.”  
  
“Bill, I’m not making excuses for these murders. You told me your advice to Detective Ziezel was sympathy, and time. This is what sympathy looks like. He’s never talked about his mother to anyone in the media, anyone in law enforcement. I’d be surprised if he’s talked to anyone at all about it. Maybe a mandated psychiatrist, but he doesn’t seem to like doctors. If he lets go of some of the trauma of his childhood, there’s a good chance he generalizes the catharsis of confession to whomever he’s confiding in.”  
  
Bill processes. “...Wendy. Please, please. Come and work here. I will give you my office and fill paperwork on the carpet in the goddamn corridor.”  
  
Wendy chuckles, clearly pleased by the response. Not the first professional overtures he’s made to her. It’s becoming a running gag. The inducements are becoming steadily more absurd. “One last thing.”  
  
“Bestow your wisdom upon me, ye mighty.”  
  
“Sorry, that’s it for wisdom. I should go over the full transcript of his confession to recharge my supplies. The court extracts skip the most important part: the beginning. I want to see what induced him to start talking, and if I can figure out how to replicate the conditions. See if some environmental factor precipitated the fugue state.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“If you-- wait, it’s that easy?”  
  
“Wendy, the case is about one degree Fahrenheit off being stone cold. If you’re generous enough to help, you can just about ask for Holden Ford’s formaldehyde soaked brain, and I’ll bring it to you,” Bill says, smiling.

Their conversation trails into another unrelated criminal case study, conducted by a team out of Connecticut. The analysis of young, violent offenders. It should be a stimulating subject, but Bill is thinking about Holden, and from Wendy’s distracted responses, she is too. He gives her Detective Ziezel’s phone number, and promises to get the requested files to her. Even after the call is ended, he finds himself staring unsatisfied down from his window. Something about Holden wanting to be FBI is still eating him.  
  
He begins compiling records to fax over to her, gets sidetracked looking through court exhibits. Among them are three photos of the interior of Holden’s bedroom. A desk littered with newspaper clippings and photos of his victims. He flips to the next photo. Above the mess, a street map of Madison pinned to a corkboard. He removes it from the stack of photos, holds it to the light. His subconscious concern unfurls before his eyes. The pinned map of possible abduction sites. A bizarre tableau. It looks, for all the world, like a diligent investigation into the identity of the murderer. But if Ford was going to go to all the effort of appearing innocent, he would have thrown out every minutiae of evidence that connected him to the crimes. He didn’t. He kept this glut of documentation like he was trying to solve his own damn murder spree. Bill glowers at the streetmap, and the taut blue wool connecting off to photographs of streets where the abductions occurred. It’s incomplete, though. One piece of wool stretches off to a blank area of corkboard. Bill squints, unable to read the street name. The pieces fit together, and he doesn’t need to. That’s where Holden was picked up driving erratically. Missy’s abduction site.

 

 

Bill can’t sleep that night. Beside him, Nancy’s even, textured breathing informs him that he's the only one suffering through insomnia. He lies staring at the roof for most of an hour, angling at Holden’s detective work, making no sense of it. What if it really is a truly split personality? It’s preposterous. Wendy would tell him how ridiculous he’s being. He gets up, sits in his study nursing a scotch and rereading Holden’s confession.

 

 

Bill doesn’t have anyone directly superior to him with whom he needs to clear the trip out to Wisconsin. There’s a tinge of guilt as he books the airfare. Wendy hasn’t phoned back, which he can’t expect so soon. He wishes someone would talk him out of going, and she’s the only person he can talk to about this case. On the surface, this is close enough to official FBI business. He’s supposed to consult in on local law enforcement cases. Except this is an old, old case, that the FBI have already withdrawn from. And Bill is just trying to clear Holden Ford out of his head. Might as well be paying for his personal therapy sessions with the BSU’s budget.

 

 

Wisconsin is warm, but it’s a grey, windy atmosphere. He dumps his suitcase in the motel room, fans out the files on Holden Ford on his table. For the hour and a half he has to kill, he reads about Ford’s childhood. He doesn’t plan on calling Ford out on lies and exaggeration, but he’s interested to see what departures from reality occur in the second interview.

 

 

He asks for directions from the bored, skinny lady at the front desk, and finds 'Max's' on Main Road. He expected a diner, but it's a Jewish deli. The yellow paint on the facade is peeling in raked lines, but the interior is as shiny sanitized as the mental hospital. It’s busy, but not too busy to spot the man he's supposed to be meeting for lunch, already halfway through a thick reuben sandwich. Tench orders a meal and joins the detective.  
  
“The FBI don’t have anything else doing, huh?” Ziezel asks messily, forearm covering his mouth.  
  
“We just sit on our asses all day waiting for you, buddy. So. Good as the stuff in New York?” Tench asks.  
  
He shakes his head with a wry smile. “My daughter moved back there for college. I’m thinking of getting her to overnight courier me a decent fucking bagel.”  
  
Bill’s food arrives swiftly, set on the table unceremoniously. He takes a few bites. Damn good sandwich. If he remarks that now, he'll just be revealing his lack of discernment. “Why’d you move?”  
  
“Madison is my ex-wife’s hometown. Our kid was getting too big for our crappy little apartment. And we needed a hand babysitting, that sort of thing. Guess I kinda got fond of the place by the time we split,” Ziezel says, glancing around. “Yeah, I'll be here right up until this place closes down. Then I’m on the first plane back to New York. No Max's Deli, no Detective Ziezel.”  
  
Bill eats a pickle, smacking his lips. “You don’t say. Ford was born in Manhattan too, wasn’t he?”  
  
“Born, yeah. I think he moved when he was still a toddler. His mother trailed around with boyfriends and the like. Sometimes following odd jobs.”  
  
Bill continues eating, but cannot relinquish the excuse to talk about Holden. Repressing that compunction around co-workers, around Nancy, had been no small effort. “You know he wanted to be an FBI agent?”  
  
“Read that too. Doctor Carr said that’s why he didn’t get himself medicated,” Ziezel says, in between mouthfuls. “She had plenty to say, and not a wasted word in amongst. I could get used to having a ringer like that whenever I needed expert advice.”  
  
Bill slips into a frown, but Ziezel’s too good-natured to be ribbing him. He goes back to his sandwich. “I think we can use it. He wants to ‘solve’ the case. I mean, they always do, but Ford in particular fancies himself a detective.”  
  
“And how does that integrate with getting him talking about his mother?”  
  
“Start with asking his opinion on the crimes. Get him talking specifics about how he thinks it happened. Then, we start asking about the psychology of the murderer. I’m gonna pitch some bullshit about a split identity. Some Jekyll and Hyde schtick to make him think we’re buying his innocent act. I’ll bring up his memory issues, ask what he was medicating with back then. Ask him why he was taking it from his mommy. Then he’s gonna sing like a fucking canary.”  
  
Ziezel smiles.  “If that’s how you say it’s gonna unfold, boss. We should probably head. You eat, I’ll drive.”  
  
Bill scoops up the parchment paper and the sandwich nestled within, trailing to the squad car.

 

 

Bill is two grumpy cigarettes deep and he’s still less impatient than Ziezel. The detective has been checking his watch in roundabout thirty second increments for the last ten minutes of their wait. Bill is pretty sure Ziezel was going to sneak this interview in as a long lunch. So much for that brilliant plan.  
  
“He’s ready,” a broad shouldered woman informs them.  
  
“Finally,” Ziezel huffs. Bill hides a wince. From the woman’s arched eyebrow, she thought it was rude too.  
  
“Good interrogation tactic on Holden’s part. Making us wait for it,” Bill says, patting his partner’s shoulder and standing. He finally looks at his own watch. A cool thirty seven minutes past their one o’clock interview time.  
  
“Piece of shit shoulda become a cop, huh?” Ziezel mutters, but the grin flashes up as they pass through the same narrow corridor towards the solitary rooms. Good. The less aggression in this interview, the better. 

They’re led past the room used last time, down several more doors. The nurse pulls out a bunch of keys but stops short. “He won’t be very responsive. Had some bad news yesterday and--” she frowns. “Well. He agreed to see you.”  
  
_You’re coddling a child murderer,_ Bill wants to inform her. He remains polite. “What bad news?”  
  
She flicks her wrist in vague dismissal of the question. “Oh, some appeal failed.”  
  
“He’s still filing appeals?” Bill asks Ziezel under his breath.  
  
The nurse overhears, and answers what was obviously not intended for her. “Oh, sure. He’s been making appeals of some kind nearly the whole seven years I’ve known him.”  
  
“I thought he moved to this facility last January,” Bill queries.  
  
“I worked at Dodge Correctional before they boarded shut the psych facilities,” she mutters, still fiddling reluctantly with the keys. Her lips are puckered with unhappiness as she opens the door. “Ready, Holden?”  
  
“...Elsbeth. Please. If you take it off for the half hour they want to talk to me, I'll--”  
  
“Holden, they’re here.”  
  
There’s silence in the cell. Ziezel is frowning, and his impatience shows as he pushes past the nurse. Bill follows, with an apologetic shrug. He stops dead. There’s no desk set up, no chairs. The cell is around the same dimensions, but there’s padding on the walls. Holden is sitting on the ledge bed, at attention. His expression is unreadably bleak. His chin is raised proudly, jutting out from the white garment. A straitjacket. Bill’s initial surprise fades quickly. Holden has made at least a dozen attempts on his own life. Restraints have been proven necessary by precedent. Their eyes meet, and Ford looks away abruptly, neck flushing. Bill notices the black eye, and the split brow.  
  
“You don’t mind being interviewed, Holden?” Ziezel asks, one eyebrow raised.  
  
“I can still talk,” Holden forces out.  
  
“Would you mind bringing us some chairs?” Bill asks the nurse. She hesitates. “We’ll take them with us,” he promises.  
  
She leaves. Bill leans back on the wall. “So, Holden. How’d you get yourself into this one?”  
  
Holden’s jaw tightens further. “I didn’t get myself anywhere. They wanted to dose me up. I asked them not to.”  
  
“You got that from declining politely?” Bill asks, gesturing to the black eye.  
  
“What do you think, Special Agent Tench?” Holden returns snippily. Bill doesn’t dignify that with response, so Holden fills the lull with justification. “Have you ever taken a large dose of Librium?”  
  
“I can’t say I have. You?” he asks Ziezel. The nurse has returned, with two plastic, fold-out chairs. Ziezel shakes his head as he takes a seat.  
  
Holden grimaces. “It’s like being in a fucking coma, except I’m stuck awake through it. My memory is shot for the next two, three months. And it isn’t that reliable to start with,” he mutters. “The doctor thinks I’m lying about my symptoms--” his gaze is jerky, sizing up the two men. Holden must not see the sympathy he wants. He falls silent.  
  
“Tell me about your appeal,” Bill prompts.  
  
Holden squirms around in his tight confine, trying to pull his posture respectable. His delicate brows drops with thought. “Appeal? ...oh. It wasn’t an appeal. It was a freedom of information request.”  
  
“What information?” Ziezel asks intently.  
  
“I want records of missing children in Jacksonville. ...perhaps _you_ could help me out there,” he says to Bill.  
  
Bill wonders at the young man sitting before him, bright eyed, engaged. Apparently intelligent. This is idiotic. Maybe even delusional. He’s never going to get police records sent to a prison. Least of all with some flimsy freedom of information bullshit. “Perhaps you could help me out in return, Holden,” Bill returns gently.  
  
Holden levels an icy stare. Bill perishes any thought of a sympathetic interview. Ford's voice comes sickly, seductively sweet. “Anything I can do for you, sir.”


	3. Chapter 3

Bill finds himself doing breathing exercises again. That this bastard has survived ten years of prison time is a miracle in and of itself. “When did you figure it was law enforcement? When you started up on that street map in your room?” Bill asks.  
  
Holden evaluates him critically. “I didn’t figure it out until I heard about the ‘Stranger Danger’ talk. Like I said.”  
  
“And when did you hear about that?” Ziezel asks. He’d followed up with the McBride family. None of them had reported calls from the prison.  
  
“I can’t remember the precise date. A year ago, maybe.”  
  
“But you didn’t tell anyone.”  
  
“Should I have told the people who unjustly locked me up that I thought one of them really did it. A polite heads’ up, so they could start disposing of any evidence that might remain?”  
  
“But you told us,” Bill points out.  
  
“You’re FBI,” Holden says. Now that Bill’s listening for it, he hears the ring of awe in the words. “I wasn’t… going to tell you in front of Detective Ziezel. No offence. You looked like you were going to leave. I needed to keep you interest in my case,” Holden murmurs regretfully.  
  
“How did you hear about the ‘Stranger Danger’ talk, Ford?” Ziezel presses.  
  
“Bring me the missing persons reports of children between the ages of four and eight in Jacksonville, Florida, between the years 1970 and 1975. And I will tell you how I heard about the unfortunately ineffectual warning that the McBride family received at their St. Paul’s Catholic Church in ‘67,” Holden says firmly. Would almost seem composed, if he weren’t twitching away inside of his restraints.

Ziezel raises an eyebrow at the negotiation. “What do you think I’ll find in Jacksonville?”  
  
“Possibly a statistical abnormality in the incidence of unsolved child abduction cases.”  
  
“I see. And which member of the Madison Police Department moved to Jacksonville in 1970?”  
  
Holden’s nose wrinkles. He looks away. Bill watches his eyes track nothing across the room’s corner. He suspects Holden’s lucidity may be short lived.  
  
“What’s the difference between Librium and Largactil?” Bill asks, though he already knows.  
  
Holden meets his eyes confrontationally, affronted by the question. “Librium is a benzodiazepine. It’s a very strong hypnotic. Turns me into a goddamn zombie. They give it to me parenterally, which is to say, they stick me in the ass. Caught me spitting the pills out,” Holden explains with a dark smile. “Largactil is an antipsychotic medication. That’s the brand name. It’s chlorpromazine. A pill a day keeps the voices at bay, or so the doctors say. ...if you’re wondering, they don’t wean me off Largactil before they start dosing me up with fucking tranquilizers. I start raising my voice on the phone, and I get a cocktail of fucked up to knock me on my ass for the next week.”  
  
“What were you taking when you were self-medicating?” Bill asks.  
  
Holden hesitates. “Chlorpromazine. Different brand name, same pills. Lower dosage.”  
  
“You mom didn’t need ‘em?”  
  
“I would _never_ have taken medication away from her. But she wasn’t taking her Thorazine. She wanted the sleep aids the doctor prescribed. That was all,” Holden finishes, dazed. His eyes seem wet for a moment, and his confined arms twitch as if willing them wiped dry.

“You think she should have been taking her meds,” Bill hazards.  
  
“Yes. I tried to get her to, for a long time. That was when I started filling her prescriptions. I would crush them up and put them in her food. She could taste them. They’re bitter, chalky.” Holden blinks, brow furrowing. He seems to regret the admission. The suspicion is back in his shadowed eyes.  
  
“You recognized her symptoms?” Ziezel prompts.  
  
Holden is still reluctant, but eventually nods.  
  
“Like what?” the detective follows up.  
  
“Paranoia. She thought I was working for my father, who was long dead even at that point. She thought he was alive, and living in Tokyo. She thought I was trying to poison her, so I could keep her confined in our home, and could go out and spend her money, of which there was none. And then my own conception of reality started waning, so I was taking the pills I’d bought for her. I was worse than her. She was very sick, but very good at hiding it. I could never hide it,” Holden murmurs wetly.  
  
Bill is beyond perplexed by tears swarming before him. If it’s manipulation, it’s a strange one. “You miss her.”  
  
“She was my only family.”  
  
“I thought you moved to Madison to get away from her.”  
  
“So? So? I moved away. I had to. You think I wanted her to kill herself?” Holden growls, standing up abruptly. Ziezel and Bill follow suit, even though a kid in a straitjacket barely registers as a physical threat. Holden is panting, eyes flickering between them. Bill thinks he sees an inkling of fear.

“Holden, she treated you like shit,” Bill blows out, hands raised with disbelief. Holden flinches, and then steps forward even angrier. Bill’s eyebrows are nearly at his hairline. This offended reaction has him perplexed beyond tact.  
  
“Get out. Get out, get the fuck out,” Holden continues angrily, teeth bared.  
  
Bill takes a step forward, finger raised antagonistically. “If we leave, that’s it. No missing persons reports. No more friendly interviews listening to your pet theories. No more FBI digging around in your case.” He glares down on the smaller man, and Holden glares right back, though Bill can see his resolve giving. “...sit down, boy,” he finishes, tone grave and gravelly.  
  
As if tranquilized, Holden slumps backwards. The emotional outpouring begins abruptly. “...she… tried her best. Everyone is so desperate to believe that she made me into a monster. Nobody made me into anything. And she was as good a mother as she could have been, under the circumstances,” Holden says under his breath. He’s shivering, and short on breath. “My lawyer wanted me to blame her. Say she abused me. She didn’t.”

Ziezel sits, huffing with relief. “I guess I must’ve misinterpreted some of her statements. Sounded to me like there was some, uh, bad blood between you two.”  
  
“She hated me. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t trying,” Holden says softly. “Having a kid when she did ruined her life. She lost her job, her family, her relationship with my father. She resented me. I didn’t have to resent her back.”  
  
“You think she was a good mother, despite the fact she hated you?” Bill presses.  
  
“I think she tried her best. Do you have kids?”  
  
Bill frowns. “One.”  
  
“And are you the perfect father?”  
  
“I love my son.”  
  
“Not loving a child isn’t the worst thing you can do to them,” Holden says, eyes skating up to the roof. He winces. “I’m sorry I got angry. I shouldn’t be prying into your personal life, Agent.”  
  
“What’s the worst thing you can do to a child?” Ziezel asks, clearly thinking of little bodies swathed in black plastic.  
  
“Putting them in a place like this would have to be up there,” Holden says, deliberately oblivious to the detective’s real question.  
  
Bill looks around the tiny room. There’s no window, no fresh air. The only illumination is the round, artificial light fixture. The precipitously tall walls meeting the blue ceiling make him think he’s looking up out of a freshly dug grave.  
  
“Was Dodge Correctional better?” Bill asks curiously.  
  
Holden shakes his head, Adam’s apple bobbing as if nauseous.  
  
“Okay, Ford. We don’t need to go into your time in Dodge. Let’s talk about the case we’re here to solve.” Holden’s focus is reignited by the encouraging language. Bill leans in. “Can you tell us who you think committed the murders?”

“I don’t know,” Holden admits reluctantly.  
  
“Who moved to Florida?” Ziezel asks.  
  
Holden grits his teeth. No point holding out, Bill thinks. Ziezel can work it out the moment he heads back to the station and accesses personnel files. Holden must decide the same. “Officer William Curtin.”  
  
“Never met him,” Ziezel says, with a receptive shrug. “How’d he give himself away?”  
  
“There were over eighty men who I believe would have had access to my home after I was first arrested. He is among them. I don’t know if he’s the killer. But he might be.”  
  
Bill cuts off Ziezel, sensing frustration from the man beside him. “Okay. You mentioned evidence tampering. Walk me through that.” Bill hopes the riddle of the street map is solved.  
  
“I didn’t have those black plastic bags in my wardrobe.”  
  
“You sure about that?” Ziezel asks, attitude slipping in.  
  
“I’m sure,” Holden returns shortly. “Someone brought them into the secure crime scene. I think it was a police officer, and I think _he_ was the murderer. I’ve asked to see the crime scene sign in sheets… if I’d figured this out before my trial, maybe my lawyer could have got access,” Holden mutters.  
  
“That’s the only thing you think they planted?” Bill asks.  
  
“As far as I’m aware.”  
  
“So all those clippings of the missing girls, that was all you? All the photographs of them on your desk, that was you?”  
  
“Yes. I’ve never denied it. I was trying to solve the case.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
Holden has the gall to blink disbelievingly. “Someone was out there murdering children. A child was kidnapped from my street.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bill sees Ziezel’s posture change abruptly. He’s leaning in with newfound intent. “Lucianne Rodriguez.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“From your street. Miner Street.”  
  
“Yes,” Holden repeats. If his arms weren’t confined in the straitjacket, Bill imagines he’d be folding them, unimpressed.  
  
“Our records say she was kidnapped off Shaddock Road. Nobody at the newsagent on the corner recalled seeing her passing.”  
  
“Eyewitnesses are unreliable. Have you driven Shaddock Road?”  
  
Ziezel nods, relentlessly attentive.  
  
“It’s busy. Busier than any of the other abduction sites. It has wide, sloped nature strips between the road and the footpath. Our kidnapper would have had to find a park, exit the vehicle, convince Lucianne into the car, walk back up. I think someone would have remembered seeing him talking to her. Especially if it was uniformed policeman getting into a car with a little girl.”  
  
“You’re sure he was wearing his uniform?” Ziezel asks.  
  
“No. A badge could have done it. But I think a uniform would have made things easier for him,” Holden says, much calmer. It seems like their first interview again, now he’s on a topic he wants to talk about. “I don’t think he exited the car during abductions. He picked quiet, suburban streets with footpaths directly alongside the curb. Roll down a window, tell the kid something-- there’d been an accident? They enter the car voluntarily, with no struggle to alert neighbours, and he drives them to a secondary location to commit the murder.”  
  
“You’ve really thought this through,” Ziezel muses.  
  
“I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms like this, Detective. Lucianne’s route home would have taken her straight down Miner. She was two houses down from us. She would have walked right past my front door, and the murderer would have driven close enough for me to see, if I hadn’t been shut in my room like Nosferatu,” Holden says, the last sentence coming in an irritated rush.

Bill’s eyes narrow. “You think… you should have stopped this."  
  
“My window faced out onto the street. I had the curtains closed. If I’d been watching, I would have seen her, and I would have seen the car that abducted her.”  
  
“So that’s why you started the research. You felt guilty.”  
  
“No, I,” Holden begins uncertainly, clearly bothered by the implication. “I wanted to solve the crime.”  
  
“You felt responsible,” Bill insists.  
  
“What does it matter?” Holden is sharp now.  
  
“Have you ever worried about the time you’re missing, Holden? Your confession that you can’t even recall? You’re feeling guilty. Don’t you want to know why?”  
  
“You’ve solved it. I dressed up in my mother’s clothing and went about murdering those children in a childhood-trauma fuelled mania. Why, my mother’s been dead this whole time,” Holden says flippantly. Bill wants to hit him. “I don’t have any missing time around the abductions. I’m not the Norman Bates flavour of crazy.”  
  
“Pretty self-assured, for a man in a straitjacket,” Bill returns.  
  
Holden’s eyes widen, and then he casts down to closely examine the vinyl flooring. Bill immediately, bizarrely, feels like dirt beneath a well-trod heel.  _Child murderer_ , Bill reminds himself.

“Where do you think the kids are buried?” Bill finally asks.  
  
“I’ve already told you--”  
  
“Okay, you didn’t put them there,” Bill hand waves. “You’re falsely imprisoned. Where do you think he buried them?”  
  
“Not at Devil’s Lake,” Holden says reluctantly. “Probably in a forest further out from Madison. Missy Rupert’s murder seemed sloppy.”  
  
“Sloppy? A deep grave in the middle of a forest is _sloppy_ ?” Ziezel asks incredulously.  
  
“He left freshly dug dirt right off a fire trail. That’s sloppy. He was rushing to get rid of the body. He would have had a police scanner. He would have heard her being reported missing, and heard the police mobilizing to find her.” From the unflinching stare, Bill deduces Holden knows what this game is. He’s letting himself get played. Maybe he’s just that eager to share his theory. “She wasn’t interfered with. I think that, unfortunately, may have been an abnormality.”  
  
Bill blinks, surprised by the admission. He hadn’t even considered that. “You believe he changed his routine due to time constraints?”  
  
Holden nods. “I have no evidence to that end, of course. Have you seen the girls? They all look startlingly similar. All with very dark hair. All short for their age.”  
  
“The implication being, he had specific sexual preference?” Bill asks, fascinated.  
  
“I’d say one of two things was happening. He was re-creating a memory that had become a sexual fantasy. Maybe his first kill: Jessica Roe, or someone we don’t know about. Maybe his first sexual assault, maybe just a childhood crush that he never got to act on. There was a little girl in his past, and he saw her in the girls he stalked and kidnapped--”  
  
“Hold up, _stalked_ ?” Ziezel interjects.  
  
“Yes. I think he’d followed them all home at least once before he abducted them,” Holden says quickly. “So. Or, he was enacting a fantasy he had about someone, and using lookalike strangers in lieu of the real deal. There was a little dark haired girl who he couldn’t risk hurting. Or perhaps, couldn’t bear to hurt. I think the physical similarity smacks of fetishization.”

Bill considers the theory. Holden didn’t have anyone in his life who fit that description, as far as he knows. Maybe it was a childhood crush. Maybe Ford is leading them on a merry little dance, signifying nothing.  
  
“What leads you to believe that he was stalking them, Holden?” Ziezel presses him.  
  
“He’d figured out the timing, figured out the optimal point for an unobserved kidnapping. That takes planning. ...that’s what the corkboard was, Agent. The street map in my room.”  
  
“Call me Bill.”  
  
Holden gives an odd smile. “Well, _Bill_ , on Miner, most of the houses are set tight on the road. Little blocks. Sandburg isn’t exactly an affluent neighbourhood. But my next-door-neighbours, at the time I lived there, had a bigger block. A couple of evergreens in their front yard. Their house was set right back. On the other side of the road, there’s a run down playground. Never anyone there, except at night when you’d see kids selling crappy weed and drinking Colt 45. Perfect spot for an abduction. I’d say, _the_ perfect spot on her route home. It’s where I would’ve picked.”  
  
_It’s where you did pick, motherfucker._ Bill blinks receptively. He looks over at Ziezel, who is writing notes. There’s a smug quirk in the corner of his mouth, that he’s trying to hide.  
  
“And the other girls?” Bill asks.  
  
“Well, I didn’t decide exactly where Missy got kidnapped. Seeing as I got arrested.”

“Why’d you pull a u-turn and try to drive away from the police? If you were just there scouting?” Ziezel asks.  
  
“I don’t remember.”  
  
“You don’t remember being arrested?” the detective follows up.  
  
Holden shakes his head. “I know, I know. Very convenient. But that week--” Holden screws his eyes closed. “I’d had some bad news that week. Mother wanted me to move out. I thought I was going to be homeless. I’d lost my job at the gas station a few months before. She--she hadn’t been to the doctor in months, so I was completely unmedicated.”  
  
“You were losing a lot of time?” Bill asks.  
  
Holden grits his teeth, but then nods. “Yes. I was hallucinating a lot, too. Experiencing paranoid delusions. I thought he-- the murderer, I mean, I thought he knew that I was trying to catch him. I thought he was watching me. I thought Missy Ruperts was a message to me.”  
  
Bill raises an eyebrow at that. “A message to _you_? You, specifically.”  
  
Holden closes his eyes again. “I can’t explain it logically. It wasn’t logical. It was untreated paranoid schizophrenia. Her father owned a sporting goods store. It sold guns. I thought he communicating that he was going to shoot me. Missy’s mother was Irish. My mother’s family were Irish. Originally. A few generations back,” he murmurs, rubbing his eyes. “I was absolutely certain it was a threat. I was sick, Ag-- Bill. Very sick. There’s no telling what I thought was happening when they arrested me.”

Ziezel clears his throat, eyes on his watch. “Sorry to bring this up short, but we’re all outta time.” Unlike the last time the excuse was trotted out, he seems genuinely unhappy to end the interview. Holden was getting very talkative.  
  
Holden nods. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help,” he apologizes, standing politely.  
  
“You did well, Holden,” Bill praises.  
  
Holden gives an uneven smile. “Do I get a cigarette?”  
  
Bill chuckles, digging into his suit jacket. “What did you trade the last one for?”  
  
“I gave it to a friend.”  
  
“A friend, huh?” Bill says, fiddling with the half-finished packet.  
  
“A friend from Dodge. Daniels.”  
  
“What did Daniels give you in return?”  
  
“He stood up for me once, and lost two teeth for it. There’s no amount of cigarettes that can pay back two teeth,” Holden murmurs.  
  
Bill pauses, closes the cigarette packet and extends it. “Well, I guess he deserves--” he pauses awkwardly. Holden’s cheeks are again tinged with shame. With his arms locked over his front, there’s no chance of him accepting the gift. Bill steps closer. He stoops a fraction, nudging open the pocket of Holden’s cotton slacks, pushing the cigarettes in. He feels the body warmth against his index finger. He straightens, catches Holden’s tiny gasp for air. The boy looks terrified, electrified. And then Tench steps backwards. Tension diffuses.

 

 

Ziezel wolf-whistles as he strides the front steps two at a time. “You had him eating out of the palm of your hand. When d’you fly back?”  
  
“Tomorrow afternoon.”  
  
“We could squeeze in a morning interview,” the detective muses. “I think another hour, and he’s gonna be giving us exact directions to the bodies. You sure had his number,” he says, grinning absentmindedly as he opens the car. “Dammit. I’m so late for this fucking meeting.”  
  
“Important, huh?”  
  
“Yeah, I’m keeping two superiors waiting. I should probably crash my car and call ‘em from a hospital ward. Only way I’m keeping my job at this point. What hotel are you at?”  
  
“Motel 6, Madison North.”  
  
“I’ll call you after the meeting. If I’m not fired, we’ll head back and crack Holden Ford. ...I don’t have time to drop you back at your motel, so you’re gonna need to taxi from the precinct.”  
  
“Can we stop at a gas station? I need to buy cigarettes.”  
  
“ _Absolutely_ fucking not,” Ziezel says with a charming grin, revving the engine.

 

 

Bill is reclined listlessly on his motel bed when the phone rings. He shakes off the phantom presence of Holden Ford, and answers. “How’s tomorrow looking?”  
  
“Pardon me?” comes a female voice on the other end.  
  
“Oh. I was expecting-- Special Agent Bill Tench speaking.”  
  
“My name is Doctor Katherine Lizbon. I was hoping to speak to you about Holden Ford.”  
  
Bill sits upright. “Detective Ziezel gave you this number?”  
  
“Yes. Well, Quentin told me the motel you were at. I had to ask the front desk to connect me.”  
  
_Quentin._ Bill pats down his pockets for the fresh cigarette packet, wishing he’d had another coffee. He woke early to make his flight, and his mind feels sodden and ungainly. “You’re Holden’s doctor?”  
  
“I was. At Dodge Correctional. I’m a psychiatrist.”  
  
“You want to talk about your patient? Is that… legal?”  
  
“If I have permission. I do.”  
  
Bill is quiet for a moment, mulling that over. “Okay. What’s the information you have on Ford?”  
  
“I’d like to speak to you in person. How long are you in town for?”  
  
“I’m flying out tomorrow.”  
  
“Oh. Well, are you busy now? I suppose I could do this over the phone.”  
  
“Sorry. Now’s not a good time. I’ll give you my office number, and my fax,” Bill says. He regrets the lie for a moment, but the truth is, he’s not up to a complex conversation. He rattles off the numbers off the top of his head, mind on the contents of his minibar.

The woman on the other end is more insistent than Bill needs right now. “My number is 1 508-693-2766. In case you extend your visit. I think it would really best to talk in person. I think… I might be the person in this world who knows Holden Ford best,” she adds.  
  
Bill didn’t write her number, and abruptly regrets it. A person who might actually understand Holden Ford. “Hang on. Can you give that to me one more time? My connection’s not great.”  
  
“1 508-693-2766. And that’s Doctor Katherine Lizbon.”  
  
“Thanks. If my plans change, I’ll call you.”  
  
“Thank you, Agent Tench. I hope we speak soon.” 

The line buzzes and Bill sets the receiver back, lips pursed with thought. He lights a cigarette from the fresh pack, turns the television on. He tries to watch the sitcom, but after ten minutes he realizes that while his eyes are on the screen, he hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s seeing. He doesn’t think he’s listened to a single word of dialogue. It’s all but white noise, and in the white noise, he sees things he doesn’t want to think about. He turns it off, taking deep drags of calming tobacco. He’s picturing Holden Ford wrapped up in his crisp white straitjacket.

Ziezel thought the interview was a cleansweep. Bill has come away with a murkier view. Holden didn’t seem like an innocent man, but he didn’t seem like a guilty one either. Ziezel thought Holden’s talkativeness was a good sign, but it troubles Bill. Holden wouldn’t bother with the airtight denial, and then fall for Bill’s hypotheticals. No. He saw how smart the young man was. Scary smart. Like Wendy. He wishes he’d had Wendy with him on the interview, to grapple with the intellect on the wrong side of the law. Holden seemed to have a better grip on the crimes than the policemen paid to solve them. He would have probably made a hell of an FBI agent.

He taps ash, scowling as his mind once more drifts to the street map. He walks over to flick through files, opens the minibar and tugs the top off a tiny bottle of Jack. He drains it in a couple of gulps before he’ll confront the photos of Holden’s room. He finds himself skipping past the photograph, looking for the written report. He scans down to the signature. He’s looking for the surname Curtin, he realizes. Indulging Ford’s conspiracy theory. He’s relieved to find it’s not the man who moved to Florida. Officer Ballard. Just as likely to be the killer, if he asked Holden. He groans and rubs his eyes. The boy confessed. He fucking confessed. Bill finds the transcript of the confession, fumbling it out in a rush. His eyes flicker across the photocopied words, trying to smother his uncertainty. _He’s guilty. He’s guilty. He’s_ \-- the phone rings, and Bill drops the paper.

“Bill Tench.”  
  
“Sorry I’m late,” comes Ziezel’s voice warmly.  
  
“Barely past six,” Bill forgives at once.  
  
“They took me off the Ford case,” the detective announces abruptly.  
  
“What? Why?”  
  
“Served me up some bullcrap about how the department’s forming a long-term unsolved case taskforce. They’re pissed I got the feds involved. Don’t want you sweeping in, showing us all up, and bad talking us to the press as FBI is wont to do. ...no offence.”  
  
“Just like that?”  
  
“I tried to talk about how far we were getting. They weren’t interested. They think he’s bullshitting us, and they don’t care for this whole ‘playing along with his innocent act’,” Ziezel says, laughs. “Kind of old fashioned with their interrogation tactics.”  
  
“Jesus Christ.”  
  
“Obviously they can’t do jack shit about you interrogating him. Mazel tov.”  
  
Bill exhales, frustration building. “Right. Well, thanks for the call.”  
  
“You could still go see him tomorrow. I wasn’t all that important to your routine, right?”  
  
Bill considers it. He’s not sure he should be in a room alone with Ford. He’s already been hypnotized when Ziezel was beside him, holding him accountable. He can still recall Holden shivering as he pressed the cigarettes into his pocket. “I’m sorry to have lost you, Detective.”

“Not your fault. Not like they fired me. When you crack the case, shower me with praise in your interviews for national news channels. That’ll show the bastards.”  
  
It suddenly occurs to Bill how neatly this event would fit into Holden’s conspiracy theory. But no meticulous psychopath would pull a move this stupid. No, this reeks of egotistical, bureaucratic bullshit. “I’ll make sure the name Quentin Ziezel goes down in law enforcement history.”  
  
“Good man. ...it’s been a pleasure, Bill.” Ziezel hangs up before Bill can respond. He has a distinct feeling that Quentin was gutted about being pulled off the case, and the frivolity was all a front.  
  
He curses under his breath, takes another bottle from the minibar, drains that one. He finds himself dialling Doctor Lizbon’s number. If he goes to see Holden while he’s this mentally susceptible, the kid will make mincemeat out of him. He needs to gain the upperhand.

“Hello, Doctor. Bill Tench here.”  
  
“Hello, Bill,” the woman on the other end greets, cautiously.  
  
Bill stubs the last of his cigarette. “My morning tomorrow has opened up. Can we meet?”


	4. Chapter 4

The business center of Madison could be any big American city, so Bill finds himself disorientated to drive fifteen minutes out of town and be surrounded by cornfields and distant scrubby forest. He refers to the written directions, turning off a highway, passing through the ubiquitous American scrub, and back into rolling fields again. Eventually he hits the yellow letterbox, and turns up the steep driveway through the whispering oak forest. Light hits his windshield dappled with the early morning sun. The driveway widens out. The house is tucked amongst netted gardens and sagging, heavy fruit trees.  
  
Nancy would just about kill for a place this wholesome. She’d always wanted her own garden, though neither of them had ever had the spare time to cultivate one.

The house itself is painted in burgundy and yellow, a combination that should be garish, but fits into the charming appearance. Almost too quaint. Looks like something Hansel and Gretel would try to eat. He’s not surprised that the doctor has a nice place, but he wasn’t expecting it to be nearly so rural, even if it is less than forty minutes from Madison. Holden wasn’t half-wrong about the lazy body disposal. Wisconsin has a lot of land for a body to go missing. He parks his hire car beside the only vehicle he can see, a green Volvo. European car, big property, free time on a weekday. Maybe he should have become a psychiatrist. He’s getting out of the car when he hears a voice calling across.  
  
“Found it okay?”  
  
“Yellow letterbox was unmissable. How’d you do.”  
  
“Nice to meet you, Bill.” 

He’d asked her to drop the formalities on the phone. She says his name with tasteful affection. It’s as if he’s meeting an old friend for the first time. He steps closer, to where she’s leaning in the doorframe. Doctor Katherine Lizbon is wearing a plain cotton shift dress, probably frighteningly expensive, and as far as Bill can tell, no make-up. She’s maybe forty-five, or older, but slim and boyishly handsome. Her hair is dark, pinned back. He extends a hand, and she shakes it briskly.  
  
“Have you eaten?”  
  
“Yes, ma’am.”  
  
“Ah. Well, I haven’t, so we can talk in the dining room,” she says, leading back through the home. Bill wonders if he should take off his shoes, but she doesn’t give him a chance. She leads straight through the simply decorated house, to a bright, open space with a large hardwood table serving as most of the furniture. There's a large photographic print on the wall, Mount Fuji topped by snow. Bill takes a seat. He can see a pomegranate tree brushing against the half-open windows.  
  
“Coffee?”  
  
“Ah, now, that I could be tempted by.”  
  
She steps away, returning with a pot, and milk and sugar all balanced on a tray. Clearly anticipated. She sets out the fruit salad that must be her breakfast.  
  
Bill makes his coffee, eyes darting about the dining room and kitchen. “Lovely home,” he remarks. “Though I’d feel lonely having so much space to myself.”  
  
“My husband passed last year. Pancreatic cancer. No, don’t apologize. You couldn’t have known.”  
  
Bill pauses with his mouth open. “My condolences.”

She scans the room pensively. “It felt like a very small house when he was here. Always singing to himself and knocking things over. And closing doors too loudly, late at night,” she laughs, sadly. “He was a surgeon. And the clumsiest man I’d ever met. Funny what you end up missing the most. ...I love this house. I just shut off half of it in winter and occupy only the heated rooms.” She picks at a piece of fruit. “But you didn’t come all this way to hear about my central heating conundrums. I should start with how I first met Holden Ford. After his trial, he was committed into secure psychiatric care. Which is to say, prison. Dodge Correctional was selected for competence of medical staff, and high security to manage a patient considered a suicide risk. He should have been in a real hospital, but there was a general consensus that law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be intermingled with murderers. You’ve been to Winnebago. They have a separate secure block for patients who are considered violent. When I first met Holden Ford, he refused to speak a word for our first three sessions. Even after that, he'd barely string together three words. He’d already been prescribed the medication he wanted in jail whilst awaiting trial. As far as he was concerned, that was the extent to which a mental healthcare professional was useful to him. A walking, talking prescription pad.”

Bill hides a smile in his coffee. “But he opened up?”  
  
“Not exactly. He landed up in hospital. A real hospital, not the facilities at Dodge. He had to go to St. Mary’s. He needed complicated surgery for internal trauma.”  
  
“Suicide attempt?”  
  
“Oh. No,” Katherine says, eyes on her food. She blinks, and Bill sees an inexpressible depth of sadness. “Not that time. He was very badly beaten by other inmates. ...you’ve interviewed Holden, haven’t you?”  
  
“I have.”  
  
“He has a temper, especially before we’d optimized his dosages for symptom management. And he’s…”  
  
“Frustrating?” Bill suggests.  
  
“Well. Yes. Yes, he is. And he was a convicted child murderer, and assumed pedophile. He was considered an acceptable target.”  
  
Bill nods grimly. “I take it the medical staff at Dodge treated Holden for injuries pretty regularly?”  
  
“I tried to get extra security for him, but he obviously wasn’t sharing who was inflicting the injuries upon him. He wasn’t talking at all. There was a general consensus amongst the prison officials that Holden Ford was getting exactly what was coming to him. I have to admit, there were times when...” she trails off. “Madison is small enough that four murders were felt keenly. Everyone was one or two degrees of separation from a missing child. I went to school with Nathan Ruperts. Missy’s father. I’d met the little girl several times. She was very clever. A voracious reader. I’d never planned on having my own children, but I’d kept toys and books from my childhood regardless. I ended up giving her father a lot of my childhood favourites to pass along to Missy. Enid Blyton. The Adventures of Robin Hood. That sort of thing. Every time I was treating a stoically mute Holden for a fresh collection of nasty bruises, the awful human lust for bloody justice was soothed. I was vindictively satisfied that the man who took her life was now suffering. I suppose that makes me a bad doctor. It didn’t affect my patient care. I was very professional.” She has a sip of her black coffee, and stands up, stepping over to a dresser, pulling free a framed photo.  
  
Bill finds himself hanging off every word, peering to try to see what she is holding.  
  
“...I tell you I knew Missy, because I want you to understand my motivation. By this point, Holden would have been twenty-one, or twenty-two. He’d attempted suicide twice, and been hospitalized another three times after assaults. He was stabbed once, luckily with a fairly dull blade. He was in the prison clinic too many times to count. He’d started talking, not about himself, but he’d want to know about the books I was reading, and about my opinions on the root causes of schizophrenia. He was very bright, and polite once he decided to drop the cold shoulder. I still loathed him. I found him manipulative, conceited, and a truly monstrous person beneath it all. He was filing an appeal, and he told me about it. That annoyed me. The next day, I took to work a photo I had of Missy Ruperts, when her Father had brought her along to my husband’s birthday party. This photo,” she says, turning it for Bill to see.   
  
It’s a candid, but well-composed photograph. A little girl reclined back on grass, staring up mischievously at the camera. Bill squints. It doesn’t look like Missy Ruperts to him. 

“It was scarcely two months before she’d been murdered. There were photos of her in the press, but they’d used her school photo. It had been airbrushed of freckles, and her hair was all pulled back, where normally she had a full head full of curls. She hated putting her hair back like that. The photographer made her. The photo circulated on missing persons posters bore only a passing resemblance to the beautiful child I’d known. To this beautiful child,” she adds, gesturing to the little girl. “I put this photo into a frame, and I put the frame on my desk facing Holden before one of our sessions. I thought I’d unsettle him, let him know exactly what I thought of his appeal. Now, _that_ was unprofessional. He came in, looked at the new photo and asked me if the girl was my daughter. Completely even. Not a hint of distress or curiousity beyond the banal. I told him it was Missy Ruperts, and he replied, ‘Are you sure?’. He thought I was playing some mental game, gaslighting him for some purpose. He hadn’t the faintest notion that Missy wasn’t the spitting image of her school photograph. I’m sure of it. I’ve spent my entire career trying to ascertain whether patients are misleading me. Amongst them remorseless, compulsive liars. I’m sure that Holden wasn’t lying.”  
  
Bill’s brow drops. “What are you saying, doctor?”  
  
“He didn’t know how his supposed victim looked. He truly didn’t know.” 

Bill's rage swells. This is why Ford gave her permission to unearth his medical history. Because he’d duped this woman into parotting his talking points. “Did you tell Detective Ziezel about your clever little investigation strategy?”  
  
“He said that he wasn’t handling the case any more. He suggested you would be the person to talk to,” Katherine says calmly, setting down her coffee.  
  
“Holden Ford sent you to me.”  
  
“Holden told me that you were looking into his case, yes.”  
  
“I’m here to solve a triple homicide. Not listen to you go on about how you got played by a psychopath with kicked-puppy-dog eyes.”  
  
“You’re never going to solve the case if you’re unwilling to grant mere consideration to alternate theories,” she returns.  
  
“He’s on tape, confessing to Missy’s murder." The sharp consonants hiss with veiled anger.  
  
“So we can add that to a long list of false confessions coerced by law enforcement,” she says, folding her arms.  
  
“Thank you for the coffee,” Bill snaps. He sets down his cup hard and stands in a violent surge. He cannot wrangle the swelling anger as he strides from the fairytale cottage. It spills free in furious, frustrated huffs. 

He closes the car door roughly, tears off down the gravel driveway. He slows down when he hits the road. Now he just feels like an ass. His lips part in a rumbling, sonorous groan. He couldn’t have handled that worse. Well, he could have thrown the cup of coffee at her. _Fuck._ He wasn’t even angry at the psychiatrist. Not really. His irritation is with Holden Ford, for playing this goddamn game so masterfully. For trailing an FBI agent out here, to backwoods fucking Wisconsin, to listen to some hippie headshrinker protest his innocence. The sun spreads generously over a beautiful Wisconsin summer day, and Bill finds himself irritated by the scenery too. The sooner he’s away from this goddamn state, and Holden Ford, the better.

 

 

The flight gives him too much time to think. The anger at being manipulated peters out. Deep down, Bill finds himself cooly impressed with Holden’s sway over the intelligent, well-trained doctor. What does Doctor Lizbon feel for Holden? She’d said she knew him better than anyone. She decided back nearly a decade ago that Holden was innocent. Seven or eight years of manipulation has her at Holden’s beck and call. Bill suspects that she informed Holden about the ‘Stranger Danger’ talk. Probably tried to access to the Jacksonville missing persons information on Ford’s behalf. Maybe she’s in love. Holden Ford is plenty handsome. And when he wants to be, charismatic in a smug way. She might appreciate all the attention from a dashing young man. Maybe she’s getting maternal, without any kids of her own to dote on. Holden would have looked very young when she first treated him. He has baby-face at twenty-nine. At twenty-one or two, he could have easily passed for a teenager. Holden would have used that. Especially if he was coming in pathetic and broken day after day.  
  
Bill’s stomach flips as he imagines Holden young and bloodied, queasy in a way that has nothing to do with the plane’s changing altitude. Holden might be a piece of shit, but Bill is disgusted with the implication that no effort was made to protect a vulnerable inmate. No wonder Holden had attempted suicide in prison, multiple times.  
  
Christ, the things that must have been done to that kid.

Bill stares at the vibrating plastic window frame, lost in thought. Beyond, the blanket of dull white cloud cover presses in unrelenting. He wishes he had scenery to distract him from memories of Holden flinching away from an aggressive movement. Nausea becomes irrepressible as Bill finally allows himself to consider that Holden might just be the unluckiest son of a bitch he’s ever come across. What if he was just too crazy to convince anyone of his innocence? The doctor was right; coerced confessions happen, especially to the mentally ill. Bill unclips his seatbelt, even though the sign is illuminated for the plane’s descent, staggers to the bathroom. He hunches over the tiny metal plated toilet bowl, spitting the brimming saliva from the back of his throat.  
  
“Sir. Sir, you have to return to your seat,” says a concerned female voice on the other side of the plastic door.  
  
“One second,” Bill calls unsteadily, gripping the wall. His knees feel close to buckling as he makes his way back down the aisle. He clicks the seatbelt on, and drops the cigarette he tries to light. He needs to speak to Wendy. She was sure Ford was guilty. She’ll bring him back to reality. Before he does something _really_ stupid, like developing empathy for a child murderer.


	5. Chapter 5

His own car is waiting for him in the long-term airport parking, and he finds Virginia that much more pleasant that Holden Ford doesn’t reside within the state lines. He should probably drop into the office, check messages, but he heads straight home. He turns up the car stereo, trying to shake the day’s events. They’re still riding his back as he walks through his front door. He drops his suitcase by the bed, traipsing out and sagging into the couch with only a passable greeting to his family. 

Nancy is making shepherd’s pie. She repeatedly steps through from the kitchen to check up on him. He kisses her on the cheek as he stands, fixing himself a second scotch.  
  
Nancy lingers in the doorway. “Dinner can wait. I can turn it off and sit down. Something’s on your mind, Bill.”  
  
“No, no. Don’t hold it up on my account. I’m fine. I’m just going to give Wendy a call.”  
  
“Wendy?”  
  
“Doctor Carr. She’s consulting on this case,” Bill explains.  
  
“I thought you were consulting on the case?”  
  
“She’s the consultant’s consultant.”  
  
Nancy hums, unsatisfied, and turns her back. Bill palms down his face, dragging his dry lips. But he files that problem to be dealt with at a later date, and steps into his study, closing the door. He finds Wendy’s number, dialling out. One ring, and his call is answered.  
  
“Glad you’re still in the office,” Bill mutters, rubbing his eyes.  
  
“Good evening. ...I might as well set up a camp bed at this time of year. Is everything alright, Bill?”  
  
“I interviewed Ford again.”  
  
“Oh,” Wendy says, obviously less than pleased.  
  
“I know. I should’ve waited for you to get back to me. I just thought I’d give your ‘mommy issues’ theory a spin. It was eating me.”  
  
“How did it go?”  
  
“Weird, Wendy. Ineffable.” 

“...go on…”  
  
“He took it all extremely personally, and kept trying to defend her.”  
  
“He was in denial about her abuse?”  
  
“Nope. That I coulda wrapped my head around. Wanting to believe, underneath it all, mommy still loved him. Weirder by half. He said, she hated him, and it was fine, because he’d put a lot of pressure on her being born when he did.”  
  
Wendy is uncharacteristically inarticulate. “Huh.”  
  
“There’s more than that.” He sips his drink and details the rest of the interview. He doesn’t even need his notes. Every line Holden delivered is about seared into his brain. He ends with Detective Ziezel being taken off the case, not the roadtrip out to the psychiatrist’s estate. He doesn’t want to tell Wendy about Doctor Lizbon. He’s not quite sure why it’s so daunting. Maybe because she’ll know, from his reaction, that he has latent doubts about Holden’s guilt. Maybe it’s simple as embarrassment, that Holden could play him from a prison cell.  
  
Wendy is quiet for so long that Bill worries the call has dropped. “The locals are freezing you out?”

“Trying, maybe. I’m FBI, and they don’t get a say in what I look into. Trying to wrest back the investigation now is gates after a bolted horse.”  
  
“You’re going back to Madison?”  
  
“Yeah. Soon as I can swing. I’ve definitely made progress with Ford. I don’t want to give him too much time to regroup. ...think I should wait?”  
  
“It’s a tough one. If you’re too attentive, he stops feeling the pressure to dispense you the information you’re after. He’ll think you’re going to come back regardless of how helpful he is. On the other hand, both sessions were finished on your end, with Detective Ziezel cutting Ford’s confessions off. You don’t want Holden to resent the enforced distance, and start closing himself off. If he decides he doesn’t want to speak to you, he will stonewall you the same as the last FBI agents who tried to interview him. ...he likes you. I’d strongly advise you to keep it that way, even if it means creating an apparent power imbalance. ...when were you considering returning?”  
  
“My next interview? Haven’t booked anything. I’m supposed to head to Michigan this week to deliver some more seminars to local police. Figured I’d stop in on my return, which’ll be … Sunday? Why?” Bill asks, disguising his eagerness poorly.  
  
“I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend. It was rescheduled, which means my Sunday is free. I’d like the chance to meet Holden face-to-face. I think it would elucidate his psychology in a way that second hand information never will.”  
  
Bill thanks a higher power he doesn’t really believe in, and tries to play it cool. “I could work around Sunday. ...thank you, Wendy.” 

The conversation with Wendy waltzes around but keeps returning to Holden Ford, and he forgets the time. Nancy and Brian are already eating when he emerges.  
  
“Smells amazing,” he says. His hand brushes Nancy’s cheek, sliding between his family members, touching Brian’s shoulder. Nancy looks up, reproach in her eyes.  
  
“You’ve got time to sit down with us?”  
  
_Oh._ He’s really in the shit. She’s normally much more contained in front of Brian. “Sorry that took so long.”  
  
She continues eating.  
  
“How’s school?” Bill asks Brian, still not sitting down.  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Just okay? Anything wrong?”  
  
“He said it was going okay,” Nancy answers. “You should eat before it gets any colder.”  
  
Bill nods. He wishes Nancy understood that his preoccupation had nothing to do with Doctor Carr. But it would be much worse to admit who was really crowding his mind.

 

 

Road school is a flickering dream of impatience. He’s on edge the moment he sets foot in Wisconsin, finally front on with reality. His senses heighten like a wild creature sensing a predator. The gusting heat from the tarmac batters him. It’s cooler once he’s driving, cooler than Virginia, but the now familiar turn off towards Winnebago jumps in his face. He turns right, instead, to the booked motel. A different motel to his last stay. Last thing he needs is a call from Lizbon. He’s pressing the shirt he wore on the flight when his phone rings. He stares disbelievingly, and picks it up without answering.  
  
“Bill?” comes an unsure voice.  
  
Bill feels stupid. “Oh. Wendy.”  
  
“Who did you think it was?”  
  
“I forgot I told you where I was staying. ...is this a raincheck?”  
  
“No,” Wendy says, feigning offence. “I’m one of those reliable academics. I’m already in Madison. Staying at the Best Western in Old Market Place. I thought we could get some dinner tonight, and discuss strategy. I’ve had a chance to go through all of the confession documents.”  
  
Bill leans back, running a hand through his hair. _Thank God for Wendy Carr._ “What time works for you?”  
  
“I was going to eat in perhaps half an hour.”  
  
“I hired a car, so I’ll come to you. Pick you up from the lobby, and we’ll walk until we find something that looks good,” Bill suggests.  
  
“Thank you. I had an Italian restaurant recommended to me by a friend.”  
  
“I can always eat Italian,” Bill says. “See you soon.”  
  
“You too.” 

Madison is the busiest he’s ever seen. Saturday night, and there’s people queueing for the theater, ducking in and out of bars and restaurants, mingling on street corners. Bill starts to worry about getting the privacy necessary to discuss child murders. He finds the hotel, not exactly the Ritz, but far nicer than his crappy drive-in joint. Then he has to circle the block a couple of times to find a park, making him five minutes late by the time he’s stepping into the lobby.  
  
Wendy is sitting neatly on a squared off leather couch. She’s fresh as if she’s just sat down, and as perfectly centered as a monk who’s been meditating for hours. “Bill,” she says warmly, and is up on her feet to greet him. A patterned coal grey dress flicks around her knees as she closes the distance.  
  
He shakes her hand, wondering if he should kiss her cheek, or compliment her outfit.  
  
She doesn’t give him the silence to worry. “I wasn’t going to stay overnight, but the idea of facing this man after an early morning flight seemed miserable. And I’m glad to have a real sit down with you before this.”  
  
“Words fail when I try to describe how happy I am to have you onboard, Wendy,” Bill says, perhaps too revealingly. He can sense the tension melting out of his muscles, dribbling away into the striped lobby carpet.

They walk the block to an Italian bistro, a cosy brick building with mass produced renaissance art prints on the walls. Wendy asks for a quiet table, which seems unlikely amongst the bustle, but they’re led back into a secondary dining room. There’s a table against a window, even if it only looks out onto the back alley, and they have what Bill would deem a “child murder discussion” berth. Wendy orders wine, so Bill does too, though he’d prefer beer.

It’s only after their order has been taken that Wendy grows intent. Bill is relieved by the gear change. He can only take so much small talk with the tantalizing anticipation of Holden’s case.  
  
But he doesn’t let her start in on her analysis. “Before you go on, Wendy, I have something of my own to confess.”  
  
Wendy’s eyebrows raise, and she looks momentarily skittish.  
  
“I… misled you about my last trip to Wisconsin.”  
  
She’s calmer at once. Bill suddenly realizes she might have been anticipating romantic overtures.  
  
He continues frankly. “I was contacted by Holden’s psychiatrist. She wanted to speak with me, about Holden.”  
  
“About her patient?” she asks, judgment creeping into her tone.  
  
“Holden had given her permission. In fact, he sent her to me.” Bill draws in reassuring oxygen. Then, methodically and sequentially, he lays out his trip to Doctor Lizbon’s home, pulling no punches on his own overreaction.

Wendy listens peacefully, her only tell the thoughtful twitches of her lips. “You were embarrassed that he was manipulating your investigation so deftly.”  
  
Bill hesitates. “Yes.”  
  
“More than that. You found her compelling,” Wendy suggests.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“You’re worried Holden’s guilt may not be so ironclad as you once believed.”  
  
Bill grits his teeth, but then he nods.  
  
Wendy exhales serenely, nodding. “He’s clearly _very_ good at manufacturing doubt. But, on this point, I can help you. I am absolutely certain of Holden’s guilt.”  
  
“You are?”  
  
“Yes. And more than that, I can extend that certainty to you.” She reaches into her handbag. Bill sometimes wonders what women keep in those cavernous leather-clad depths. Here is one unconventional answer: a dossier on a murderer. “As I was studying his confession, I began to grow more and more curious about his testimony that it was a fugue state.”  
  
“You don’t think it was genuine after all?”  
  
“Actually, I suspect it was,” Wendy replies. Her lips delicately curl with an anticipatory smile. “But I think Holden has lied about other periods of memory loss. I think it was happening more regularly than he was letting on, even around the times of the murders. Perhaps even during the murders. I went back over the case files. He was walking downtown on the morning before the Rodriguez murder, when his alibi was that he’d been home alone all day. Now, the sighting didn’t intersect meaningfully with the time of abduction, so the sighting was deemed unimportant. It was hours earlier. But why lie, and claim to be at home all day? I think he’s smart enough to realize he would be on CCTV, and that his unkempt appearance would make him easily identifiable. Denying it was stupid. That is, if he remembered being downtown at all.”

Bill is fascinated, losing sight of everything else in the room except Wendy. “So he was losing more time than he was letting on.”  
  
“Yes. Yes, I think he was,” she says. “He lies to cover up his memory issues, for fear they might indict him as unable to refute the accusations. He continues to outwardly deny the crimes, and has shown that he will concoct falsehoods to fill in time he cannot account for. So...”  
  
Bill cottons on at once, setting down his wine in a hurry. “So why not the confession?”  
  
“Exactly. If he’s willing to lie, he could have just claimed that the police who arrested him left an open file in the back of a squad car, or intimidated him, anything to allay his guilt. He didn’t, and I think I know why he didn’t. You remember how non-communicative he was about almost every detail of this case. But he made it pretty clear that he didn’t remember confessing. Right after his lawyer started trying to convince him to submit an insanity plea. Probably as soon as he read his confession.”  
  
“What did he give away?”  
  
With a finally unfurled smile, Wendy extends the confession. “I’ve notated the line. Read from there.”

Bill skims through the description of smothering the life away from Missy Rupert’s lips, down several lines, until he hits the little red asterisks. “...okay. ‘I gave her the caramel corn, and I told her we had to go to the hospital. I told her it was ...unintelligible. I told her it was out of town.’ …out-of-town hospital? Is that relevant?” Bill asks, squinting.  
  
“No. The caramel corn.”  
  
Bill tilts his head a fraction. “Is that so damning? They’d already conducted the autopsy. Anyone with an in on the investigation would have known the killer fed her. Hell, it was reported in the papers. Holden could’ve just read about it.”  
  
Wendy shakes her head. “It was reported in the papers as popcorn. The lead detective even said that they thought maybe the killer had come straight from a movie theater.”  
  
“That’s... pretty close.”  
  
“Close, but distinguishable. Especially as she ate it less than an hour before her death. Forensics went back to the samples of her stomach contents. They used mass spectrometry to determine the sugar content. I called the lab, and spoke to the technician who did the analysis. He said, indisputably, it was caramel coated popcorn, the type you’d see sold at a school bake sale.”

Wendy puts down the file as the food arrives, thanks the waitress, but doesn’t touch her seafood pasta. “Holden had already correctly affirmed plenty of non-public knowledge in his confession. Caramel corn versus popcorn didn’t seem like a big deal next to the fact that he’d listed the exact type of bindings on her wrists, and the colour of her underwear. That was information only the police had. Her stomach contents didn’t get any play at trial, because Holden wasn’t pushing his ‘the police are in on it’ conspiracy theory. He wasn’t claiming he’d been fed information. He might have, but that he knew he’d admitted something that the police had got wrong. They couldn’t have fed him the information, because they didn’t have _that_ information.”  
  
Bill nods, but he’s yet beyond doubt. “...he thinks the killer was a policemen.”  
  
“The two who brought him in were traffic, completely uninvolved in the active case. They interviewed Ford in a small precinct across town from where the murder investigation was happening. No other policemen were present at any point in his interrogation. ...if the evidence was planted in his home, as he alleged in your last interview, it wasn’t by Officer Creighton or White. They ceased all involved with the case at that point. Creighton was a forty-eight year old mother of three. White was sixty-three. He retired a year after the confession. Now, demographics aren’t the most reliable way of ruling out suspects, but--”  
  
“But they do okay,” Bill finishes. 

Wendy nods, watching Bill process. He chews a piece of steak, turning over the logic over and over, seeing no flaws. She begins eating her now cold meal, hiding a triumphant smile.  
  
He swallows. “Son of a bitch,” Bill mutters, rubbing his chin. There’s the trace of unshaved stubble against his palm. He looks up at the roof. He expected anger about Holden’s manipulation, but mostly, he’s relieved. An innocent men hasn’t spent the last ten years in hell.  
  
“He’s guilty, Bill.”  
  
Bill nods slowly. “Damn, I should be better at my job after this many fucking years. ...now I’m even more embarrassed I didn’t tell you about Doctor Lizbon.”  
  
“I’m glad you did. She’s a perfect investigative asset, if we can turn her on Holden.”  
  
Bill laughs and wipes his lips with a napkin. “If you don’t like the FBI, maybe you could try becoming CIA. Or, uh, a murderer. I don’t think you’d have any trouble running circles around me.”  
  
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”  
  
Bill grins, raising his wine glass. “Sure is, Doctor Carr.” At the chime of glass on glass, his relief gives way to an unhappy realization.  “He remembers at least some of the last murder, but you think he might not remember all of his crimes.”  
  
“There’s that possibility.”  
  
“Christ. So much for him leading us to the bodies.”

“I’m optimistic he remembers enough to solve this case. I don’t think he necessarily buried the other three bodies in discrete locations. It may be one grave site with multiple bodies. If he revisited the site, he obviously remembers his way to it. I also suspect the site, or sites, were much further away than Devil’s Lake. The further the distance, the longer these fugues would have to have lasted. From his confession, he recalled at least a portion of Missy Rupert's murder. There’s likely moments of lucidity in there. Details that we could use. ...he could have driven several hours, disposed of the body, perhaps even slept in the car, returned. Not as if he had school or work responsibilities to note his absence. His mother said he’d be out of the house for a full day at a time. Sometimes overnight. That’s a lot of time, compared his other periods of memory loss.”  
  
_His mother said a lot._ But whatever protectiveness had been kindling for Holden has been extinguished. He no longer pities the murderer. Bill feels grimly intent. He bites into a piece of steak, grinding connective tissue down between molars. He can’t wait to tear Holden Ford apart. “Okay. How do we use this against the little shitheel?”


	6. Chapter 6

“Hello, Holden. My name’s Doctor Wendy Carr. Nice to meet you,” Wendy says, in the doorway.  
  
“Nice to meet you, Doctor,” Holden says. It’s a particularly hot day, and the hospital seems to have scant air conditioning. Inside the cell is even warmer. Like a lifeless greenhouse. Holden looks sticky, hair tufting in humid curls. He’s out of the straitjacket, the shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, blue cotton open several buttons to the undershirt beneath. He’s sitting at the desk, wrists chained, not that it seems to bother him. He seems taken with Wendy at once.  
  
“Holden,” Bill greets, reluctantly. Easy to play bad cop, considering what he thinks of Ford.  
  
“...you met Doctor Lizbon,” Holden says cautiously. “I’m sorry. I would have told her to be more upfront. I knew you wouldn’t appreciate being jerked around.”  
  
“Yeah? How would you have handled it?”  
  
“Fax the information to you so you had time to consider it.”  
  
“You’re right. I would have prefered that.”  
  
Holden purses his lips, clearly considering pursuing forgiveness. He changes tack, and smiles at Wendy. “Are you here to psychoanalyze me?”  
  
“I’m more inclined towards academic psychology than clinical.”  
  
“You study criminal psychology? Memory loss? Schizophrenia?”  
  
“Criminal psychology.”  
  
Holden looks very impressed. “You got your doctorate, recently I assume from your age, and then decided to work for the FBI?”  
  
“Oh. No,” Wendy says, smiling. Bill can see her hating his charm. “I’m just consulting.” 

Holden seems to be involved in serious calculation. He wipes sticky hair back from his forehead, and Bill sees a ropey pink scar running lengthwise down his inner forearm beneath the cuffs. The young man follows his eyeline to the scar, and self-consciously twitches his hand beneath the desk.  
  
“Would you mind answering some questions for me? I think it’s important to develop a more complete understanding of Holden Ford before I even consider the question of your guilt or innocence,” Wendy says pleasantly.  
  
“So you’re coming into this… how should I put it? Tabula rasa? That’s very rigorous of you,” Holden says, though Bill can hear the deep buried sarcasm.

Wendy isn’t trying to fool him on that count, though. Holden would see through that. She’s trying to trick him into changing her mind. “I don’t think reading about you will help me get to know you, Holden. You’re not very talkative, and when you’re talkative, I’m not sure you’re honest.”  
  
“That doesn’t _sound_ like you’re coming into this cold, Doctor.”  
  
“Well, you’ve been convicted by a court of a very serious offense, and I’ve come to interview you at the behest of the FBI. I think we can discount this as a perfect blind.”  
  
“I’m not expecting an educated woman like you to ignore context,” Holden says quietly. “I’ll answer what I can.”  
  
“Thank you, Holden. I suppose I should start earlier. When exactly did you start experiencing symptoms, and how did they first manifest?” 

Holden leans back and folds his arms across his body. Not too far off a straitjacket, Tench thinks. “Voices.”  
  
“Of who?”  
  
“I didn’t recognize them all. Sometimes it would be someone I knew-- my mother, a teacher, but they rarely adopted longterm identities.”  
  
“And what did they say?”  
  
“They told me to kill. Joking, obviously,” Holden says quickly, looking genuinely apologetic. Oh, so we’re playing nice with _Wendy_ , huh? “Not much of interest, often completely nonsensical. Sometimes they’d just say a phrase, or one word. Hard to remember, in the same way dreams are hard to remember. Um, ‘bring an umbrella’. That one I remember, because it was so vastly situationally inappropriate. It happened when I was trying to sleep.”  
  
“You never thought they were real?”  
  
“Sometimes I-- they _felt_ real. But I knew I had schizophrenia. Mother told me my biological father had schizophrenia and it drove him to suicide. They met at a support group, I think. She didn’t want to talk about it.”  
  
“Eileen told you that when you were young?”  
  
Holden seems taken aback hearing his mother’s name. “Oh, yes. Long before the symptoms started. When I was four or five.”

“She explained suicide to you that young?”  
  
“It was the truth,” Holden rebuffs politely. “I’m glad she told me. It meant, when I got sick, I knew what was happening.”  
  
“But you didn’t get medical care for your sickness.”  
  
“Well, I didn’t want it on my medical transcript. And I thought, if I couldn’t manage it, I wasn’t fit to do the work I wanted to do. As my disease progressed, I think my rationality degraded too. So it was a reinforcing loop in that respect. I wasn’t just trying to conceal my illness, I was trying to prove that I was better than it.”  
  
“You were very set on the FBI.”  
  
“I was,” Holden says, glancing at Bill, or rather, Bill’s badge. The defensive posture concretes. “I suppose you can characterize that as another delusion in your interview notes. Or textbook psychopathic overtures towards positions of power. But I really did want to change the world.”  
  
Wendy beholds him. “You wanted to leave a mark.”  
  
“Yes. I wanted people to say, fifty years after I was dead, that Holden Ford made the world a better place.”

“So why FBI?”  
  
“Because I’m fascinated by crime, and what drives people to commit it. I want to understand what makes people do terrible things. ...if it’s not too bold, you must have chosen your area of study for a reason, Doctor.”  
  
Wendy nods. She leans forward. Bill can see a tendon in her shoulder like a heavyweight mechanical spring. The persona she levels Holden’s way is relaxed, receptive. “That’s why you believe you can catch the person who really committed the crimes.”  
  
Holden raises one eyebrow sharply. “What makes you so sure I did it? You haven’t even tried to listen.”  
  
“Pardon me?”  
  
Holden stares at Bill, accusatory. The anger abates. “That’s it, yes, Doctor Carr.”  
  
“I am listening, Holden.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Did your progressing symptoms interfere with your social life?”  
  
“What social life?” Holden asks. “I moved around a lot. I didn’t have many friends.”  
  
“No close friends, then?”  
  
“None in particular.”  
  
“And you didn’t date? Not even in college?”  
  
Mentioning college is obviously a sore point for Holden. He sucks at his own mouth, lips twisting. “No.”  
  
“Did you want to?”  
  
“Of course,” Holden answers, abruptly.  
  
“Women or men?”  
  
“Women-- well-- you know. Girls my age.”  
  
“You found your peers attractive.”  
  
Holden’s politeness has dissipated. “So I tell you about the crush I had on a twelve year old, when I was twelve, and you can say that confirms that I’m a pedophile?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do, Holden. I’m not trying to trick you into admitting something.”  
  
“Bull. Shit. You two are here with the express purpose of making me misstep. Sorry to sabotage your interview, but it’s not going to work for you. I don’t know where those girls are.”  
  
“You don’t remember.”  
  
“No, I don’t _know_ ,” Holden returns. Bill feels the unpleasant itching of sweat building on his forehead. The room’s prickling heat isn’t helping his temper. He keeps thinking about the autopsy photos. The caramel corn.  
  
Wendy still seems immune, to the heat, to frustration. “I know you were experiencing periods of elongated memory loss around the times of the murders--”  
  
“I wasn’t. That wasn’t until after--”  
  
Wendy jumps in. Maybe she’s feeling the frustration after all. “What about the day of the Rodriguez murder? You told the police you were home all day. You didn’t remember being downtown.” She’s as pissed off as he is. Maybe he should intervene, make some excuse, reset the interview.  
  
Holden’s brow drops. “I remember that entire day. I just lied. I was out scoring pills. I was going to overdose on morphine. They were too expensive. I decided to buy just a couple, and hang myself instead. I thought it would be easier to hang myself if I was drugged up.”

“Then why’d you lie?” Bill asks. The whole thing seems like an excuse. He can’t tell with Holden.  
  
Holden turns, flatly irate. “My dealer was a nice woman who I didn’t want to get into trouble.”  
  
“Yeah, you would have made a hell of an FBI agent if you couldn’t bear seeing a drug dealer go to jail.”  
  
“Fuck you,” Holden growls.  
  
“Watch yourself, boy,” Bill says softly. “You think this can’t get worse for you? Dodge is still open, even if they’ve changed the name. Maybe we say you’re not crazy after all, and you get transferred back. Reunite you with some old friends.”  
  
Holden’s rosy flush drains away. He looks sickly cold in the humid cell, scraping back in the chair, standing up, retreating a half step. He speaks under his breath. “Get out. I don’t want to talk to you any more. Get out.”  
  
Bill curses under his breath. “Holden, sit down.”  
  
“Fuck you. Get out.”  
  
“You want us to leave?” Bill challenges.  
  
“Yes. And don’t come back.”

 

 

Wendy strides off ahead of Bill as soon as the room is opened. He knows she’s fuming that he started threatening Ford. He shouldn’t have done that. It was tasteless, unrehearsed, counterproductive. Above everything else, stupid. A symptom of Holden Ford diseasing his brain. He turns at the crashing of plastic furniture, hearing Holden’s ranting voice. Bill pauses, and then keeps walking. Two orderlies push past him towards the impromptu interview room.  Bill has to stop at security to pick up his gun, and Wendy doesn’t wait with him.  
  
He descends from the arched, barred doors, and finally catches up, and only because she’s forced to await her lift away from Winnebago.  
  
She looks statuesque in her fury, arms crossed, eyes imperiously narrow. The heat finally seems to have reached her, the normally impeccably silky hair fuzzing around her cheeks. She’s silent on his approach, but as Bill opens the car, she relents. The wrath sags out of her posture with a long sigh. “Well. That was a fucking disaster.”  
  
“Sorry. That was--” Bill pulls out a cigarette. He lights it, noting a tremor in his own hand. He really shouldn’t let Holden get under his skin like this.  
  
“Yes, it was,” Wendy finishes, with a small frown.

 

 

“He’ll cave,” Bill says grimly as he starts the car.  
  
“I don’t think he will. I don't think we’re ever getting anything out of Holden Ford.” Wendy is decided, and bleak.  
  
Bill keeps trying to formulate conversation, but Doctor Carr is cosmically distantly. He drops her off at the Best Western, with another apology, and then drives through downtown Madison until he spots an open bar.  
  
He has two hours before his flight. If he’s going to stew, he’ll stew in whiskey. He orders a double bourbon, which is free-poured by the dark haired bartender in a Hawaiian shirt. Anything to erase the clarity of the day’s events. The bar is called ‘Lei Me Down’ which should have warned him away. But Bill is too tired to find another joint, and the decor is haphazard and lazy enough that he can resist the attempt to spirit him away to the tropics. An electric fan sends merciful, fleeting relief from the muggy day. And the bartender didn’t bother trying to upsell him to some shitty tiki cocktail with half a fruitbowl wedged on the side of the glass. Small mercies.  
  
He finishes his drink too quickly, orders another, and begins to calculate how much he could drink and still pass a sobriety test. If he’s pissed off local enforcement, they might decide to start throwing their puny weight around. And then he’d have to explain to Shepard why he was in Wisconsin at all.

He toys with his cigarette, any attempt to avert his mind eventually circling back to the case. “Have you ever bought caramel corn?”  
  
The bartender, perhaps the bar’s owner, looks unsure as to whether Bill is addressing him. But the bar is otherwise empty, so he clears his throat.  
  
“Pardon me? Caramel corn?”  
  
“Popcorn in caramel,” Bill explains, perhaps a bit rude. He softens himself. “Sorry. Strange question. It’s normally at school bake sales, that sort of thing.”  
  
“Oh, sure. Caramel corn,” the bartender cottons on, setting down a cloth. “Yeah. At fairs and that sort of thing. I think I’ve seen it at the supermarket, but I wouldn’t buy it. You could make it yourself pretty easy.”  
  
Bill tries to imagine the raw-boned teenaged Holden Ford in a supermarket aisle, selecting candy to keep his victims quiet. The image doesn’t come together. Then, Holden peering into a pot of bubbling candy in his kitchen. No. How _did_ he get them into the car? That fake policeman angle was obviously bullshit. Even a kid could see that Holden wasn’t police. Too young, too scruffy. In his confession, he’d said he offered Missy Ruperts a lift. Bill highly doubts that. No kid is that dumb. Especially if the creepy looking stranger literally offers free candy. Perhaps the candy was just in the car, left behind by Holden’s mother. It’s a pretty juvenile food, in his eyes.

He finds himself wondering about Holden’s hypothesis that the murders were replicating a desire that couldn’t be inflicted on the real target. If the killer had a daughter, he might just have candy corn lying around in his car. Bill’s fist tightens on the lowball glass when he realizes the thought he just entertained. Holden fucking Ford. “Can I borrow your phone?”  
  
The bartender nods, though there’s a hint of reluctance. _He must think I’m a goddamn psycho. Well, at least he’s acquiescing, even if it’s out of fear._ Bill finds Ziezel’s card in his wallet, phoning the detective’s work number.  
  
“Detective Quentin Ziezel, how can I help you?”  
  
“Quentin, it’s Bill.”  
  
“Oh. Heard you’re in Madison again.”  
  
“How’d you hear that?” Bill asks suspiciously.  
  
“Nurse from Winnebago called to ask what sort of table I wanted for the interview. Just as well no superiors overheard that one. Had to explain that the case was FBI. Nice to know you’re still working him over,” Ziezel says conversationally.  
  
“Yeah, speaking of. I wanted to have a chat to the police who arrested him. Creighton and White. Do you think you could rustle up contact details?”  
  
“And get fired? You really do have something personal against me, coming after my livelihood like this.”  
  
“Is that a no?”  
  
Ziezel laughs blithely. “Can I call you back at this number?”  
  
“Sure,” Bill says. Might as well trespass against this pleasant bartender a little longer.

 

 

He orders a house cocktail, by way of apology, tips well. He doesn’t even think he’s going to drink the tropical abomination, except that it tastes really damn good. He checks his watch a couple of times. He’s draining the tall novelty glass when the phone rings.  
  
“That’s for me.”  
  
“Are you police?” the bartender asks, eyebrow raised.  
  
“Kind of.”  
  
Ziezel starts abruptly. “Okay. Good and bad news. White died of emphysema three years outta retirement.”  
  
“Jesus. How did he pass the physicals standards to be in the field?”  
  
“What the fuck physical standards are we talking, Mr. FBI? He was a traffic cop.”  
  
Bill laughs, maybe a bit too hard. “Okay. I’m hoping the good news is Creighton’s still kicking.”  
  
“Lives in town. She’s retired now.”  
  
Bill exhales, gesturing to pen and paper behind the bar. The bartender extends it over, and Ziezel reads out a phone number, and then pauses.  
  
“Well, in for a penny. Want her address too?”

Bill writes that down as well, rushing through his thanks, hanging up the phone. He checks his watch, leaves another five dollars on the bar as he hurries out. He still has to return the hire car before he gets on the plane. But as soon as he makes it to rental office, staring across at the mirage of silky wet tarmac, he knows he’s not leaving Wisconsin. He’s let doubt in again, let himself wonder if that fucking caramel corn could have worked its way into Holden’s confession in contamination from the real murderer.

He can’t bring that baggage back home, to Nancy, to Brian. No, he needs certainty before he gets on that plane. He reaches into his breast pocket, pulling free the scrawled phone number and address.


	7. Chapter 7

Mary Creighton’s house is on Lake Wabesa, a short drive from Madison, easy enough to find with the aid of a gas station road map. The suburb is not as prestigious as some of the lakesides Bill’s seen in his time, but the houses are pleasant and widely spaced, and there’s plenty of overhead greenery to soak up the afternoon sun. Number 981 Knopwood Road is a large and boxy house, painted warm grey, surrounded by a sloping, scant garden. There’s a boatshed, open, and an aluminium dingy beside several shelves of paint and toolboxes. Bill lets himself through the front gate, following the beaten bare dirt track cut through the lawn. He knocks before he notices the doorbell tucked to the left of the door, but hears footsteps before he follows up.  
  
The door is pulled inwards by an imposing figure, an older man with a crew cut and a large salt and pepper moustache. He’s wearing a polo shirt, and Bill is surprised by how fit he looks for his age. He’s evaluating Bill with heightened suspicion, even as he smiles.  
  
“How can I help you?” asks the tall man, in a hard but friendly manner.  
  
“Hoping to speak with Mary Creighton,” Bill says, allowing his tone to sound more clipped, timid than usual.  
  
“Mary?” the man calls over his shoulder. “I’m her husband. Gregory.”  
  
“Nice to meet you. Bill,” he says, extending his hand. “How about this weather, huh?” he asks blandly.

The taught regard becomes amenable, even if Bill still senses lingering questions. “Weatherman reckons it’s due to last the week,” Gregory says, rubbing his hands together. “And I plan on spending as much of that week sitting out under that there yonder beech tree with a beer in hand, and my rod at the ready.”  
  
“Do you get good fishing this ti-- oh. Hello, Mary.”  
  
She smiles, distracted. “Gregory, I’ve left the jam on. Could you stir it please?”  
  
“Well, I suppose there goes my plans for a day of doing diddly squat. Nice to meet you,” Gregory says, jaunting back inside.  
  
Mary Creighton steps forward politely, but she’s clearly confused. Bill begins to wonder if he should show his badge, but he has the distinct feeling she might clam up should this feel too formal.  
  
“Hello. I don’t believe we’ve met…” Mary Creighton greets.  
  
“No, we haven’t. Bill Tench. I’m with the FBI, ma’am. We’re trying to locate Holden Ford’s missing victims, and we need your help.”  
  
“Oh. _Oh_ , how could I help you with that? Would you like to come in?”  
  
He glances her over, in uniform of the leisurely aged: a linen shirt and white capris. Her husband seems to be a suspicious man. He’s better off only having to deceive one person. “Would you mind if we walked down to the lake? The case details, I’m not sure--”  
  
“Well, sure,” she says, sliding on flip flops resting beside the front door. 

She’s barely off the steps before she’s chattering excitedly. “Wow, so, Holden Ford. That brings me back. You would not believe the media attention. People made it out like I chased him down and tackled a gun away or something.”  
  
“You saved lives, ma’am. You might as well have taken a live firearm from him,” Bill flatters. He’s seen this woman in a fair few interviews, and she seemed to relish the thin beam of limelight. He decides on the heavy handed technique of affirmation.  
  
“I don’t know about that. I just did my job.”  
  
“You’re one of the only people to ever get Ford to cop to even a fraction of his crimes,” Bill says. There’s an old tire swing, and more grass, leading off towards a  “You have a lovely home. Wow. How about these trees?”  
  
“Oh, they sure are old. Old as anything.” She smiles. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”  
  
“Well, we want him to be as talkative with us as he was with you. There are parents out there who deserve to bury their child. If you said something, threatened him with something, charmed him in some way, we’d love to hear it, so we can emulate you.”  
  
“Emulate me?”  
  
“Yes, indeed. Only one confession, and it came to you.”  
  
Mary flushes, running a hand through her dyed red hair. “Oh. Well. I mean, we should have stayed inside. Greg could help more than me.”  
  
Bill’s poker face fractures for a moment. Luckily Mary is ahead of him. She’s sillhouetted against the bright cut glass of rippling warm water and reeds. The hum of marsh insect life amps up with every step. “Yeah? Should we go back inside? ...he helped you with Ford?”  
  
“Well, he was deputy back then. He sent--” she falls quiet. “Wow. It’s getting colder, no?”  
  
_It’s not._ “All that water,” Bill politely agrees, pretending to be distracted.  
  
“Maybe we should go inside. Talk to Greg.”  
  
“Yeah. That’s a good idea. Greg might have some ideas. Honestly, we are just at the end of our tether. Our guys who tried the first time, back in the sixties, well got nada. A real piece of work,” he says, stepping back towards the house.  
  
He watches Mary’s shoulders give. “Oh, yeah, he sure is. What a creep. Honestly, the moment I saw him, all of my skin was up in goosebumps. I felt like I was seeing the devil wearing a human suit,” she says. Bill recognizes the phrasing from an old newspaper clipping.

Bill emulates her at once. “I tell you, being in a room with him? I don’t know how you stayed so calm to hear him out.”  
  
“Well, I kept on saying to myself, those little babies, they’re up there watching me. If I could be strong for my own kids-- you know, like a mother lifting up a fallen tree-- I could be strong for those little girls who needed me to get them back to their families.”  
  
“I’ll try that,” Bill says seriously. Another near-identical quote from another '69 interview. They’re rounding the house, and he’s running out of time. “...so Greg sent some boys over to talk you through the case?” he prompts.  
  
“They didn’t talk to me, much. Just made sure Ford knew we had him by the short and curlies, even if we _didn’t_ until he confessed,” she says, laughing. “We weren’t there, but Greg could give you the name--”  
  
“Which name?” comes the voice of Gregory, rounding the front steps.  
  
“Greg, my jam,” Mary says at once with a glance at an open window. Must be the kitchen, from the emanating scent of sapid toasting sugars.  
  
“Turned it off. You know I’ll just ruin your food if you let me at it. ...I had no idea where you two got off to together. Gave me a turn when I came back out front.”  
  
“Bill wanted to see the lake.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Bill’s with the FBI. I guess that’s Special Agent Bill Tench, right?”  
  
“Yes, Ma’am.”  
  
“FBI? Is there a problem-- …oh. You’re the one on the Ford case,” Gregory says, friendliness evaporating, though his smile remains. His teeth are in excellent condition too, white as perfectly combusted ash.

“He was just asking me how I got Ford talking.”  
  
“What did you say?” Gregory asks abruptly.  
  
Mary glances at Bill, then back at her husband. “...I…”  
  
“Mary, go inside.”  
  
Bill folds his arms, wishing for a split second his gun were not already stowed in his checked luggage, in the boot of the hire car he’d rented for an additional day. Mary departs obediently for her kitchen. Bill’s about done talking to her anyway. The invisible hubbub of insects seems to dim momentarily as the screen door closes behind the ex-policewoman. Gregory stalks down the last step, but Bill is all calmness again.  
  
Greg must be at least sixty, even if he is a large, healthy man. He’s using his additional inches as he comes face-to-face with Bill. “I don’t care for you feds, coming on into _our_ house that we’ve set in order, pulling the furniture around, telling us you’d fancy it done different. No. No, thank you. Get off my property.”  
  
Bill scoffs at the metaphor. “We’re moving the furniture around because we’re conducting a search, sir. When people start getting real twitchy when we go near a bookcase, you know what we do? We check behind the bookcase.”  
  
“I don’t care for your insinuation.”  
  
“I don’t care for finding out that a murder case has been contaminated by incompetence and willful subversion of justice,” Bill returns unimpressed. “Who did you send to talk to Ford? Which detectives from homicide?”  
  
“How dare yo-- you know what, Agent? We’re done here. Come back with a goddarn warrant.”  
  
“I’ll do that. You have a nice day. Hope your fishing is as successful as mine,” Bill finishes pettily.

He stalks back to his car, pulling roughly off the roadside park with a spray of grassy clod. Fast as he drives, his racing mind outstrips the hire car.

 

 

Ziezel was too green to put two and two together, and realize a retired deputy police chief was a Creighton too. So. Traffic cops pull over a deranged Holden, blathering about the case he was trying to solve. Bill remembers a break early in the interview transcript, what he’d assumed was a strategy discussion. No. That was phone-a-friend. Mary calls up her husband, asks him what she should do. Deputy Police Chief Gregory Creighton calls homicide and... and the murderer was handed a patsy on a silver platter. Probably didn’t expect Holden to be such a pain-in-the-ass supersleuth. The kid’s memory was too shot to remember the source of the planted details. But, even if Holden had recalled, and started making accusations, the police ranks would have closed right up. These backwater morons have spent the last decade protecting a goddamn child murderer, while some innocent kid rotted in a prison cell.  
  
Bill tears down a wide lakeside road, the glare of waning summer sun off the water frying his retinas. He slows as he meets the highway, realizing how brutally hard he’s gripping the wheel. At least now, he knows where he’s going.

 

 

The nurses don’t want to let him in again, but between his badge and his manifest impatience, he’s ushered back inside Winnebago Mental Health Institute. No asking Holden’s permission this time, because he’ll never get it. The FBI agent is led down the set stage of sky-blue open hallways, passed barred cells and bolted doors to the rest of the facility. The woman louring at him beside the cell door doesn’t want Holden’s fragile sanity being further fractured. It’s the same nurse who knew Holden back in Dodge Correctional. _Jesus. Ten years._  
  
“He’s been medicated. I don’t know what you--”  
  
“Thank you. I can take it from here.”  
  
She opens the cell door, and Bill steps past her with an insincere smile. The cell is barren, Holden hunched over in a corner as the only fixture. He’s swathed in white straps once more, hair damp with perspiration, expression drooping helplessly. His restrained body remains, but his mind is obviously departed. There’s no analytical stare, no response except a low groan of recognition.

“Holden. I need to talk to you,” Bill starts.  
  
“Fuck you, flat top,” Holden slurs out. He seems to want to stand, but his legs loll at awkward angles as he tries to push upright. He gives up his attempt, and yells. “Nurse! Nurse, I don’t--”  
  
“Shut up,” Bill says roughly, squatting down.  
  
“Or you’ll do what?” Holden asks, phrasing uneven and hurried. His speech has all the grace of dropped clay. “Go on, hit me. I know you wanted to today. You could do it. They never believe me anyway. Threaten me with prison rape, or whatever that bullshit was. I thought the FBI had higher standards than--”  
  
Bill does hit him, barely. An open handed slap, to attention. Holden is silent, finally, though his hazy eyes still challenge the FBI agent.  
  
“Holden. When you were brought in, when you confessed, which homicide detective did you talk to?”  
  
Holden can’t understand that, in his state. “I… I don’t remember confessing--”  
  
“Well, could you fucking _try_ ? The interview started. You’re talking about the case, and the girls, but you’re not copping to any of the crimes. Then someone from homicide spoke to you, with the camera off, and you’re a songbird. Who spoke to you, Holden?”  
  
Holden’s eyes are wide without seeing. “...homicide? I-- Bill, I don’t remember.”  
  
“Goddammit,” Bill huffs out, standing up to pace the tiny cell.

Holden’s brow wrinkles, screwing eyelids closed, a pantomime of concentration. “I don’t _remember_ . I’ve told you, I--”  
  
“He screwed up. He was feeding you confirmable case details, shit he knew the police already had. But he said caramel corn instead of popcorn, because he knew what he’d fed her.”  
  
“What?” Holden asks, eyes opening to blink rapidly.  
  
“That’s him. Whoever told you the kid ate caramel corn, that’s our guy.”  
  
“I can’t remember,” Holden whispers. “I’m sorry,” he says, after, voice straining. He’s trembling. Bill suddenly feels monstrous. He kneels down, a hand on Holden’s arm, through the thick white cotton.  
  
“Hey, kid. It’s okay. It’d be easier if you remembered, but I’m going to figure it out. Hey, hey,” Bill begins to reassure, as Holden crumbles. “Don’t-- don’t cry, okay. That’s not gonna help things, is it? Hm? Chin up.”  
  
“You believe me?” Holden sputters out wetly. There’s drool on his lips, messy and infantile. He doesn’t seem aware of how pathetic he looks. Bill understands better Holden’s aversion to the Librium.  
  
“I believe you. It’s gonna be okay. You just keep yourself together, and-- and the FBI will sort this shit out, okay?”  
  
Holden’s chin dips in a nod that never rises. Tears are dribbling off his nose now, onto his hunched knees. He’s staring up at Bill with a something frighteningly close to hero worship.  
  
“It’s gonna be okay,” Bill repeats, squeezing Holden’s shoulder hard.

“You’re gonna come back?” Holden murmurs.  
  
Bill nods.  
  
“Good. I-- I probably won’t remember this either. Benzodiapa--the benzodiaza-- the drug they give me--” Holden mumbles, finally self-conscious. “I probably won’t remember today.”  
  
Bill wonders if the murderer could have drugged Holden before the confession. It’s not beyond belief, especially if he had access to evidence lockers. It would explain the lack of lucidity during the confession. He realizes his hand is still on Holden, and he withdraws. Holden sniffs, leaning down to his own shoulder to wipe his nose.  
  
“Y’could talk to… to Kathy…”  
  
“Kathy? Oh, Doctor Lizbon.”  
  
“She’s doing research. She could-- she’s got files and files--” Holden trails off.  
  
“I’ll tell ‘em I need you lucid for interviews. Make sure nobody doses you up again.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“Don’t go thanking me, whizzkid. I’m gonna need that brain of yours to catch a criminal. This is self-serving.”  
  
Bill thinks it’s the first time he’s ever seen Holden’s real smile. It’s a sight to behold.


	8. Chapter 8

Bill dials out to Nancy from a payphone in the lingering bruise-mauve of the evening. He thinks he made himself clear at Winnebago, about Holden being left the hell alone, but he probably could have cussed less. The clouds have slipped into view, thin and striated, like raked fingernail marks across the face of an assailant. It’s still sticky warm. Bill nervously eases his cigarettes from the pocket of his short sleeved dress shirt as he waits for his wife to pick up.  
  
“Hello?” comes the familiar voice, so many miles away.  
  
“Hey, Nance. It’s me.”  
  
“Home late tonight?” she asks, resigned.  
  
“I’m not at Quantico. I’m in Madison.”  
  
“Wisconsin? Still?”  
  
Bill hums in affirmative. “That case I was working on is-- well. It’s more complicated than I figured.”  
  
“So you’re staying another night?”  
  
_It’ll be a fucking miracle if I can wrap this up in a day._ “Yeah. Just one, I hope.” He doesn’t, as a rule, talk to Nancy about work, but here he can’t help himself. “I’ve figured out why it was eating me. I’ve been flying out to interview a convicted murder. Try to get more information out of him. And he’s innocent.”  
  
“...you know for sure?”  
  
Bill is quiet, realizing that no, he doesn’t. “I can’t prove it yet.”

 “Who is he? The innocent man?”  
  
“Some kid. Suffers from schizophrenia. A little shit, actually, but you’d expect that after ten years doing hard time for a bunch of child murders--” he grimaces. He hadn’t intended to mention the victims were children. Nancy will find that upsetting.  
  
“How awful.”  
  
“Yeah. I think the murderer was someone in local law enforcement, to dig this hole deeper,” Bill says softly. “Like you said. An awful case.”  
  
“You sort it out, and get home. Don’t get into trouble. You’ve got a partner there in Wisconsin, right?”  
  
He grits his teeth, preempting the lie. “Yeah, I do.” Maybe it’s not a lie. He has Holden, after all.`  
  
“I’ll see you tomorrow night, then?”  
  
“Yeah. I love you,” Bill says, overburdened by the crusade his conscience demands.  
  
“I love you too. ...you are going to be careful, aren’t you?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“I’ll see you tomorrow night, then,” Nancy says, hesitating before she disconnects.

 

 

Bill smokes sitting in his car, knowing he should go rent a motel room for the night, finally get some rest. It’s just past seven, but he thinks he’d be asleep the moment his body touched mattress. He starts the car, but instead of a place to rest his weary coil, he is driving out towards Mount Horeb, and Doctor Katherine Lizbon’s house.

Too late to show up on someone’s doorstep, he knows, by all measures of propriety and good manners. This whole miserable situation is well beyond that. He turns at the yellow letterbox, abruptly, heading on up the driveway. The house is illuminated pastel yellows in the blue darkness. Another light clicks on as Bill parks the car, but the door doesn’t open. Not even after he knocks. He hears Lizbon’s uneasy call through the thick wooden door: “Who is it?”  
  
“Bill Tench.”  
  
The door doesn’t open. “...what do you want?”  
  
“He’s innocent. We need to talk.”  
  
Like Ali Baba’s magic words, the door is yanked inwards. Katherine Lizbon is far less composed, in a large sweater and slacks, hand loosely pointing an old hunting rifle down.  
  
Bill raises his hands, more apology than surrender. “He told me to talk to you.”  
  
“It’s nighttime,” she says, but the protest sounds half-hearted. “What changed your mind?”  
  
“May I come in?”  
  
“I didn’t think I was cooking for two,” she says, but steps aside to allow the FBI agent in from the warm, lively night.

Bill finally has a moment of realization that he’s beyond starving, thirsty too. He had a coffee as breakfast, and no meals following. Probably explains some of his manic behaviour. “I spoke to Mary Creighton.”  
  
“What did she say?” Lizbon says, arrested by the name. Bill’s glad to have another person as obsessed with the case as he is. No need to keep explaining the underpinnings and relevance of details.  
  
“She told me she called her husband, and he send someone around to talk to Holden, off the record.”  
  
“She said that?”  
  
“Let slip, is more like. She seemed to know Gregory was going to take issue. And he did,” Bill hastens out. The smell of chicken fat and herbs fill the air. There’s a pang to his abdomen, the kind he hasn’t felt since marching with no rations in basic. “...I’m sorry about leaving so abruptly, last time we spoke.” He takes a few more steps into her home, stares again at the photograph of Fuji. “I didn’t want to consider that you were right.”  
  
“You did. Otherwise you wouldn’t have worked out what no other investigator has bothered to. ...I should have been more upfront. I wanted you to hear me out. That meant a lateral approach my conclusions about Holden’s innocence. Can we forget-- you know--”  
  
“We’re on the same team,” Bill affirms. Have to be, really.  
  
This woman has been investigating for years. None of the officials tools of investigation, but none of the legal impediments either. Lizbon might be his most valuable resource on this case. Without some serious court granted subpoenas, he’s not getting his hands on the tracts of local police documents he’s going to have to fine tooth comb for the real killer. Even with a subpoena, it wouldn’t surprise him if some files had been “misplaced”.

Katherine steps past benches into the kitchen, but her clear voice issues from the alcove. “So Deputy Creighton sent out someone. Did they say if it was someone from homicide?”  
  
“No. I tried to get further, but-- well. Do you have the names of the people who worked homicide?”  
  
She’s out of the kitchen at once, gone down the hallway, coming back with an open box. It’s obsessively notated with a multi-coloured filing system; her fingers deftly skim cardboard tabs and tugs free a thick dossier. She opens that, turns three pages in, setting it under the light of the kitchen table.  
  
Bill sits into her Swedish looking dining chair, wishing he had his reading glasses. Somewhere in his suitcase, if he had the energy to fetch it. Now he’s sitting, it’s as if he’s superglued into his exhausted slouch. “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”  
  
“Oh. Sure. Do you want a coffee? Really, there’s probably enough soup. I was going to freeze some for the upcoming week--”  
  
Bill almost refuses, some early childhood conditioned politeness. He catches himself. “I’d appreciate that. Haven’t had a whole lotta time to eat. I’m supposed to be back in Virginia by now.”  
  
“You don’t want to do this investigation remotely?”  
  
“I want to speak to Holden tomorrow. I was hoping you would come.”  
  
“I’m not sure I should--”  
  
“The interview today didn’t end well. Holden got heated enough that they tranquilized him--” Lizbon’s eyes tighten protectively, and Bill grimaces. “Well. I saw him again, but he said he might not remember talking to me. So he might not be looking to cooperate with the FBI.”

“How does Holden need to cooperate?”  
  
“...he was right, about it being police.”  
  
“You think he can help solve this?”  
  
Bill realizes how absurd it sounds, but doesn’t budge. “He knew it was police. This guy is careful. I don’t think he’ll have left us much. If my approach is to start investigating the Madison Police Department, alleging misconduct, trying to get Holden a retrial, it’ll take months or years to get his verdict overturned. The local guys are going to fight every step of the way, no matter how much FBI personnel I can bring in. Meanwhile, the killer reads the news, or gets a call from his old boss, and gets an advance warning on the investigation.”  
  
“You want to catch the killer first.”  
  
“Yeah, I do. Prove it’s an ex-cop. Arrest him for the crimes that he’s probably continued to commit wherever the fuck he is. That right there is gonna get even the most conservative, law-and-order judge frenetic in releasing Holden. And the child murderer doesn’t get a chance to start scrubbing out his car and trashing evidence.”  
  
“It sounds like you’re more worried about catching your criminal than freeing Holden,” she says sternly. She’d been bringing over a bowl of soup, but withholds it.  
  
“I told him I was going to fix this. I’m a man of my word. ...kid has been through enough. Let’s do this the quick way. Sooner Holden is out, living a normal, peaceful life, the sooner I can start sleeping through the night.”

The doctor sets down his soup, satisfied. She’s turning away, energetic as she fixes herself a bowl too. Bill tries to eat politely, but he’s ravenous. He finishes the bowl, and the bread she set out, and stares at the names of the homicide detectives.  
  
He flips back through the file, which includes not just the team at homicide in ‘67, but the local precinct who would have been in charge of securing Holden’s residence when it was searched, found to have not just a litany of missing child paraphernalia, but the plastic bags identical to those used to dispose of Missy’s body. He realizes he’s looking at Holden’s eighty names of people who could have accessed the crime scene. He finds the name William Curtin, and his current address in Jacksonville, Florida. Bill had gone through the missing children statistics, back when he’d simply been trying to reassure himself that Holden was a manipulative psychopath. No unusual patterns there. But as he flicks through the names, he reaches Holden’s stated impasse: plenty of people could have screwed with the crime scene. This investigation was about as airtight as pumice.  
  
“How’d you get all these names? Surely they weren’t all in the local papers.”  
  
Lizbon pauses, soup spoon halfway to her mouth. “It was Holden’s idea. I said I was part of a documentary film crew, doing a piece on how these crimes were solved, trying to get hold of the people who worked the case. I knocked up a fake business card and handed it out at the precinct. People want to get on TV, so once word got out I just had to field calls and write down details--”  
  
“That’s ….moderately-to-very illegal. You do know I’m FBI?”  
  
Lizbon raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to arrest me?”  
  
Bill runs a hand over his face. “Remind me not to ask stupid fucking questions,” he mutters. 

He’ll need to reverse engineer a legitimate source of Lizbon’s research. He should call Detective Ziezel. He can’t completely trust the guy, he’s on the inside, but he’s obviously not involved in the cover-up if he sent Bill out to Mary Creighton. Not tonight, considering he only has Ziezel’s office number. Too late to catch him there. Too late to call Wendy, who he'll need to wrangle onto his side of this impending clusterfuck. Too late to be doing anything but finding a motel room. His hand hovers over the files, unwilling to leave this treasure trove at least glanced over. He still has so many questions. “Do you have Holden’s medical transcript?”  
  
“Yes,” the doctor says, face this time betraying some ethical qualms.

“I don’t need the whole thing. Just-- well, I guess the start. Who was the first doctor who classified his confession as reasonably lucid?”  
  
Lizbon skims the box to the blue tab, flicking her way through another yellowy document wallet. “His first interaction with a medical professional after his arrest is… eighteen hours later.”  
  
“ _Eighteen_ hours?”  
  
“Eighteen, yes. Well, he slept, they tried to interview him again, and then they had him transferred to--”  
  
“Wait, he slept? They let him _sleep_?”  
  
“Well, it was the middle of the night.”  
  
Bill shakes his head, eyes narrowed on the page. “They only have to give him eight in twenty four. No way that happens at the suspect’s convenience,” Bill says, frowning. “Any competent interrogator would go sixteen hours straight of interview.” Again, he’s unearthed an ugly ambiguity. In one light, incompetence, in the other, Holden passing out after being drugged by the real killer.   
  
She hesitates, and then hands over the file. Photocopied files, annotated with the same methodical black pen. Good handwriting, for a doctor.   
  
“And no drug testing?” Bill asks, scanning through the report.  
  
“No. He said he was clean, in the interview--”  
  
“If he ate, or drank, he wouldn’t have a clue what was in his system,” Bill says, rubbing between his eyes. “Holden told me he loses time when he’s dosed with tranquilizers.”  
  
Katherine is thoughtful. “Yes. Benzodiazepine class drugs can cause both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, but Holden has a particularly severe reaction. ...did the Creightons say something?”  
  
“No. Doesn’t matter anyway. Can’t prove a thing, seeing as nobody gave a shit about the condition Holden was in,” Bill says, scowling. He should nip this blossoming protectiveness in the bud. It’s going to make him do something stupid, sooner or later. He feels himself getting sloppy with emotion, and exhaustion. He presses the heel of his hand against the itching tired eyelids.

Mary must see his faculties declining. “Is your motel back in town? I have a guest room.”  
  
“I don’t want to--”  
  
“We should get up early. Holden’s going to be happy to see you.”  
  
Bill chuckles unhappily. “I don’t know about that.”  
  
“Oh, sure. He’s always talking about the FBI,” Katherine says. “I’ll set up the spare room for you.”  
  
Bill smiles, distracted. He can hear her moving about next door, and though he should be fetching his suitcase, or giving her a hand tidying, he stares at the Holden’s written up medical history. There’s a photo on the first page, which is the arrest mugshot he’s seen. Holden’s scrawny, defiantly-raised chin. Then, a couple of pages of medication specifications and psychiatric evaluations later, another photo. 

Holden’s arms are restrained to a hospital bed with plastic cuffs, and he’s unconscious, or at least, his eyes are tightly closed. He's no longer emaciated, curves of muscle where there was concavity and jutting bone. The mop of hair is gone, and even though Bill thinks Holden is much younger, the haircut is nearly identical. But Holden is not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. A swollen weeping eye, bloody cotton buds in his nose, bruises on his arms and neck, several fingers splinted on his left hand. That’s only the injuries visible in the photograph. Beneath it, a photocopy of a brutally blunt incident report. He gets one sentence in and closes the file sharply, feeling sickeningly intrusive. He read enough. A prison beating. The people he threatened to send Holden back to.  
  
His bile rises further when he remembers Holden’s sedated tirade; Holden had heard the threat of ‘prison rape’. Likely, the last words the kid remembers from the FBI agent. No, Holden Ford is _not_ going to want to see him.


	9. Chapter 9

“What is this?” Holden asks. He’s plaintive with betrayal. He entreats Doctor Lizbon with slow blinks, flushed cheeks. It’s still warm in the cell, but no longer the unbearable sauna. If Holden is unbalanced by that administration of Librium yesterday, he’s hiding it. A soft and calm surface, and beneath it, the razory resentment inching higher.  
  
“Agent Tench believes you.”  
  
“Is that what he said to you?” Holden returns, doubt dripping from the syllables. He’s yet to even look at Bill.  
  
“That’s what I said to her, yes. Guessing you don’t remember our second conversation yesterday?”  
  
Holden’s eyes are dark slits. There are the two plastic chairs Bill asked for. Lizbon takes one, but Bill doesn’t sit.  
  
“Okay. Well, I told you I spoke to Mary Creighton. You told me you didn’t remember who told you that Missy Ruperts was given caramel corn by her murderer, and I told you I’d figure it out anyway.”

Holden's head tilts, eyes dead with hatred. “I must have failed to communicate. I should have said: I hope your plane back to Virginia falls out of the fucking sky.”  
  
“Holden,” Lizbon chides.  
  
“He’s lying!” Holden is heaving with frustration now, chest swelling inside the white confines. “He’s trying to get me classified as sane, and sent back to Dodge--”  
  
Bill intervenes. “Holden, there is no way, with a decade of legal wrangling, that I could ever getting you classified as gen pop. I was trying to rattle you, because you were holding up too well to my interrogation technique. I got frustrated and I got nasty. And I’d like to apologize for that.” He sits down, showing his palms.

Holden doesn’t appear forgiving, but he asks the question he’s clearly desperate to. “What did Mary Creighton say?”  
  
“She said that she called her husband, Deputy Chief Creighton, and he sent someone out to do some unofficial interrogating.”  
  
“That’s what changed your mind?” Holden scoffs.  
  
“No. You changed my mind. Hearing that you were set up _allowed_ me to believe you.” Bill says, to no response except narrowed eyes. “And why are you still in that straitjacket,” Bill growls without ever approaching a question, stands.  
  
Holden scoots back a foot, voice higher with anxiety. “Kathy--”  
  
“I’m just going to take that stupid thing off, okay?” Bill says, frowning.  
  
“Do you want it off, Holden?” Lizbon asks cautiously.  
  
“Of course,” Holden replies, not getting any closer to Bill.  
  
“May I take it off you, then?” Bill asks, approaching polite.  
  
“Fine,” Holden says through gritted teeth.  
  
Bill is too tense, stepping behind Holden. He squints at the confusing rows of straps. He can see the lines of cinched cotton that are confining the arms, so he starts on one buckle. It means touching Holden, transgressive of every boundary he should have with this man. But it’s a brief touch, and he sets one cotton-enclosed hand free, and then the other.  
  
“Can you--”  
  
“On my front,” Holden rushes out, strangled.

Bill steps around. The last confining strap runs back to front, through Holden’s legs, over his chest where his still crossed arms are held. He loosens that, and then the tightly winched collar. He thinks he feels Holden’s pulse on the back of his hand, prickling and vibrant. Then he drops the line of heavy cotton and steps back.  
  
Holden is straining now. He bulges in contortion, like some newborn struggling at an amniotic sac.  
  
“Do you need--”  
  
“No,” Holden says roughly, finally straightening, with an arm out of the sleeve and underneath the fabric. He snakes up from the hem, opening another strap, and then pulls the whole mass of heavy fabric overhead. His white t-shirt rides up over an almost equally pale stomach. Then his escape is complete. Holden pulls his tshirt down, holding the straitjacket away from his body as if contaminated with acid. He tosses it to the cell's far corner. He’s panting shallowly, still glaring violently at Bill. No straitjacket, no shackles. The freest Bill has seen him.  
  
Bill expected at least a smidge of gratitude, but quickly tempers expectations.  
  
“What? Am I supposed to lick your shoes now?” Ford asks dangerously.  
  
“I just need to be able to talk to you, Holden. If we work together, we get you out of this place. You do want out of here, right?”  
  
Holden rolls his eyes.  
  
“You don’t need to like me, I don’t need to like you. Judging by your shows of willpower with other interrogators, I can’t make you talk to me. You wanna clam up tight, that’s your prerogative. I’ll get out of here, and go about this investigation myself. I’ll get there. I’m good at my job. _But_ , it might all happen a little faster if you deign to communicate with me.”  
  
Holden scratches the thin stubble that’s come out across his chin. “Did I call you ‘flat top’?”  
  
“You remember?”  
  
Holden doesn’t look up, wrinkling his nose. “Through a glass, darkly. I figured I was dreaming. You know. Seeing as you didn’t treat me entirely like shit.”

Bill frowns, guilt clutching at his stomach momentarily. “Well, guess I should ask again. Do you know who you spoke to just prior to your confession?”  
  
“Still a no.”  
  
Bill sighs, but he takes the response to mean Holden is cooperative. “Was there any real difference in your time loss back then, and the time loss you experience when given Librium?”  
  
“The memory loss without drugs tended to be more discrete, and more concretely beyond my reach. Usually was clustered around early morning and late at night. I was an insomniac, so--” he shrugs. “On the benzodiazepine, I can hang on to snippets of when I was tranquilized, but my memory problems persist for months following. It also depends on how many repeated dosages. If they keep me under for a week, I have no chance of remembering any of it. They stopped giving me--” Holden pauses, eying off Bill. “You asked them to keep me lucid,” he asserts.  
  
“He did,” Lizbon says, leaning forward.  
  
“You think the murderer drugged me?” Holden guesses.  
  
“Maybe. Hell of a coincidence that your memory is wiped slate clean. You must have considered it.”  
  
Holden nods, sitting down on the bench bed. He is no longer ramrod defensive. He seems to have registered that he really has the reach of the FBI available. “Can you get the Jacksonville--”  
  
“I checked already. Nada.”  
  
“Dammit,” Holden says, running a hand through his hair. “Okay. If you go to Kathy’s house, there’s a list of names--”  
  
“I’ve seen the files. Heard that cute stunt pretending to be a doco crew was your idea.”  
  
Holden hides a smug smile, pretending to smooth his shirt. “It’s got all the new addresses we could find. Some people moved away, and we never reached ‘em.” 

“Why are you so sure our guy moved away?” Bill asks, taking out pen and pad.  
  
“The murders here stopped.”  
  
“And you’re certain his crimes continued elsewhere?”  
  
“He kills four little girls in a year, and then goes cold turkey?” Holden asks disbelievingly. “If his self control was that good, he wouldn’t be jeopardizing his entire life to fulfill this sexual fantasy.”  
  
Bill hums agreement. Not the worst partner he could have found, all things considered. Still, he pushes back.  
  
“Doesn’t mean he moved. Two hours to major population centers. Three to Chicago. He mighta just started going further afield for victims.”  
  
Holden shakes his head. “Crossing state lines is risky. The man we’re looking for is not a risk taker. An out-of-state number plate is more remarkable. Witnesses would report on it.”  
  
Bill lights a cigarette, to give his hands something to do. He finds himself nodding along. “I think he ditched the brown station wagon when you were arrested. It might have just been an impound vehicle. Unfortunately, records aren’t going to go back a decade, so the car is a dead end. ...I think he’ll be more careful now. He’s smart and methodical, and he’s law enforcement. He understands what an investigation will look for. He’ll have changed up enough of his MO to avoid shifting blame away from you.”  
  
Holden nods, leaning in.  
  
“So we stop looking for victims, and we start looking for survivors. A little girl who got spun a horror story by a guy with a badge, or in uniform, but got suspicious and didn’t get in the car. It’ll be recorded as someone impersonating law enforcement, even though that’s not really true.”  
  
“I don’t think he’d let someone get away,” Holden murmurs. “He went to all the effort to frame me. He’s paranoid. ...he could have been in a disguise. He could use a new car each murder.”

“Well, then, how do you suggest we find him?”  
  
“Go through missing persons at the locations police personnel moved to and--”  
  
“I’ll do that. I’ll bring in more manpower from Quantico, men I can trust to be discreet. This is a professional investigation now, which means multiple angles. Now, following up on attempted kidnappings with law enforcement impersonation cases within a couple of hundred miles, that’s one angle. What else do you suggest?” Bill says, deadly serious, exhaling cigarette smoke with the question. He holds the pen and the burning cigarette in one hand, grey curls calligraphied with each note he jots.  
  
Holden frowns.  
  
“You wanted to be FBI, Holden, this is what it’s like to--”  
  
“Okay, I get it,” Holden huffs. “...get police records of tip lines, sightings that were phoned in, but discounted. If he’s on the inside, it’s likely he’s been burying condemning information from the start.”  
  
“Good,” Bill praises, though he'd already considered that angle. ...it certainly took the federal agent more time to get there.

Holden’s brow wrinkles inwards with attention. “Get the crime scene sign in sheet. Find any familiar names. Round up Creighton’s friends in the force, old partners, anyone he might have owed a favour to, or be owed by. You can probably find a lot of that in cases that would be public record through court testimony.”  
  
“Now, how many cigarettes do I owe you for that?”  
  
“Fuck you, flat top,” Holden mutters, but it sounds fond.  
  
“You’ve started smoking?” Lizbon asks, and Bill abruptly, sheepishly remembers that he isn’t alone with Holden.  
  
“No. I give them to a friend.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow, but Bill doesn’t see the maternity he expected. An odd friendship.  
  
“I have a question,” Lizbon says gently. “Is Detective Ziezel able to feed us information from the inside?”  
  
Bill frowns.  
  
“He doesn’t think I’m innocent,” Holden states flatly.  
  
“Well, I haven’t actually told him you’re innocent. He’s city police, the exact department that I think is behind framing you. When the chips fall where they may, some heavy fucking chips are going to be falling on Madison Homicide.” 

“I think you should talk to him. He seems like a good man,” Lizbon says, loosening her silk scarf. “Moreover, the moment subpoenas showing up, you’ll inform his department about the investigation. There is immense value in information extracted before the minutiae of the cover-up is scoured by the individuals involved. We can compare what Quentin gives us now to what they provide under court order. I’d contend that the discrepancies are the real narrative.”  
  
Bill grits his teeth. Katherine is right, even if he doesn’t want her to be. But Quentin is going to be a hard sell. He doesn’t even have the energy to think about convincing Wendy. “Okay. I’ll call Ziezel. ...I need to fly out tonight,” he informs them both. Holden’s lips purse at once. “I told my wife I’d be home, and I have exactly no second chances left on that count. But I’m only going back to Quantico to get this show on the road. I’ll leave my business card here, Holden. Anyone starts showing up trying to threaten you, you call me, or get one of the sympathetic nurses to inform me.”  
  
“And you’ll kiss your wife goodbye and come save me?” Holden asks sarcastically.  
  
Bill meets his eye seriously. “Yeah.”

 

 

Bill says his cursory goodbyes to Doctor Lizbon through the window of her Volvo. The conversation seems spent, then Katherine leans through the window with an addendum.  
  
“You should talk to him. Give him updates. Keep him occupied.”  
  
Bill thinks she’s talking about Ziezel for a second. But no. She wants him to comfort Holden, even though he’s probably the worst equipped human on the planet to do so. He can barely comfort his own damn kid, let alone some schizophrenic genius who hates him.  
  
“He really likes you, you know.”  
  
And she’s gone with a whirr of understated European engine power. Bill is left lost, above the tree lined outlook of Winnebago Mental Health Institute.

 

 

He drives several blocks until he spots a phone booth outside a pizzeria, and calls to book a flight home. It takes longer than he’d like to arrange a mid-afternoon flight, and the sun is starting to creep up onto the back of his neck. He ducks into the merciful shade, finds Ziezel’s business card and dials his number. It rings too many times, and Bill is about to hang up when a woman answers.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
He pauses. “Hello. Jeff Smith here. Looking for Quentin Ziezel.”  
  
“Detective Ziezel isn’t at work right now.”  
  
“Ah, darn. Any idea of when he might be in?”  
  
“...no. What are you calling in regards to?”  
  
“Well, I tried him at home, and I figured I’d try him at work. I’ve gone and accidentally taken his coat home. It’s got some stuff in the pockets, I wanted to let him know he hadn’t been robbed blind. Is he out--”  
  
“You’d be best to try him at home,” the woman says, a little shortly. “This is an official line.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” Bill says, and hangs up, teeth gritted. He doesn’t lie very well on the fly, especially compared to most of the people he works with. That was passable. Hopefully banal enough to discourage further inquiry.  
  
Something is more pressing: Quentin isn’t at work, at 9:52 on a Monday morning. He’s been fired, or suspended. Bill doesn’t have a home number for him to confirm it. He takes the main road towards town, the radio blaring Fleetwood Mac. It only serves to push up his blood pressure, but he doesn’t find himself changing the upbeat song. Instead, he taps into flooding, churning emotion. Ziezel didn’t deserve to lose his job over this, but it confirms one thing. Quentin, if he doesn’t hate Bill’s guts, is definitely on their side.

 

 

He parks outside Max’s Deli, scanning the scant pre-lunch crowd. A couple of men drinking short blacks and eating wedges of crumbling coffee cake. No Ziezel. Bill approaches the counter, clears his throat.  
  
“I’m looking for Quentin. Has he been in today?”  
  
The man behind the counter is squat, old, and spry. He wipes his hand on his apron. “Well, who's asking?”  
  
Bill frantically runs through recent FBI scandals for any allegations of anti-semitism levelled at the Bureau. “Special Agent Bill Tench. Quentin and I have been working a case together, but I’m getting stonewalled by his bosses.”  
  
“You got him fired. He was in here yesterday, saying his goodbyes. Thinks he’s back home to New York,” the man says, flatly.  
  
Bill’s glad he opted not to lie. “Damn. Hoped it was just administrative leave.”  
  
“What’s the fucking difference? They’ve hated him since he stepped foot in the place.”  
  
“I’m trying to fix it.”  
  
“Yeah? You and the FBI, coming in here to root out the piece of shit cops in Madison? You know, my shop’s been here twenty-eight years. Count the fucking swastikas. And what’d they do about it?” 

“You don’t have to tell me they’re dumb fucking rednecks,” Bill says, professionalism fading. “But Quentin is one of the good ones, and I want to make sure that when I burn this place down, there’s at least one decent cop I can appoint to watch over the ashes.”  
  
The man laughs, squeaky yet full-throated. “Max. Nice to meet you, Bill. Quentin lives two blocks from here. We’ve got his address for deliveries.”  
  
“You guys deliver?”  
  
“Not just for anyone,” Max says. He ducks behind a white dividing wall, returns with an address scrawled on wax paper. He extends it.  
  
“Uh, if you could keep this all to yourself--”  
  
“I only know one cop, and he just got fired.”  
  
“Thank you,” Bill says, pockets the address.  
  
“Thank you? You got the man fired.”  
  
Bill returns the incredulous stare. Then, he reaches for his wallet. “Two pastramis. And, uh, what sweets does Quentin go for?”  
  
“Apple cake,” Max says, tapping his nose. “You’re learning, Bill.”

 

 

Bill walks up the staircase to Quentin’s apartment with a plastic bag full of take-out. It’s an old brick building, not unlike New York apartments, and about as clean. He knocks hard on the door, waits, and is met by Quentin. His normally slicked hair has risen like spring foliage, his eyes are bleary against the light. He’s wearing a blue bathrobe, and as far as Bill can see, nothing beneath it. Chest hair peeks from the low, open neckline. And despite Bill’s expectations of animosity, Quentin gives a wide grin.  
  
“Well, if it isn’t the son of a bitch who got me fired. Come on in,” he says, ducking off back into the cool, musty darkness.  
  
Bill closes the door behind him. “Need something to mop up the--” he inhales. “Jack Daniels?”  
  
Ziezel laughs, flopping onto a couch that’s half-covered with a blanket. There's an empty bourbon bottle on the coffee table. Bill sets the take-out beside it, and sits in an armchair.   
  
Ziezel opens the bag, picking through. “You know how to apologize. Your wife is a lucky lady.”  
  
“Normally it’s flowers, for Nancy, not two pounds of cured meat,” Bill says wryly. He opens his own sandwich. Lizbon’s idea of a wholesome breakfast was barely enough to whet Bill’s appetite, especially with the energy debt accrued the day before. “So. They fired you.”  
  
“Administrative leave. Mary Creighton must’ve got back to ‘em after you called.”  
  
“Actually, I went over in person. And I doubt it was Mary. Her husband, Greg, or Ex-Deputy Chief Creighton.”  
  
“Oh. Huh. I guess I pissed in the wrong cereal,” Ziezel says around his mouthful of pastrami. “Oh. Dammit. I did kinda know there was some Creighton of significance knocking about. These small fucking towns.”

Bill inhales, and then exhales. _Just fucking get to it._ “Quentin, Mary told me that her husband sent someone over to talk to Ford. Someone from Madison City Police. To shake up the kid. Plant some information in Holden’s head.”  
  
Quentin’s face sours. “Wouldn’t shock me. There’s about one set of police ethics in this fucking town, and they all take turns with it.”  
  
“Holden Ford’s confession was coerced, and riddled with planted information.”  
  
“And that’s gonna be a pain in the ass to replicate for the interview. ...okay, what is _that_ look?”  
  
Bill sets down his sandwich and goes for the trusted cigarettes instead. “I don’t think he did it.”  
  
“You don’t think Ford did it? What, any of it?”  
  
Bill shakes his head.  
  
“Okay, sure, a coerced confession shouldn’t be concrete evidence, but why would he say anything if he was innocent?”  
  
“I would love to know. But, frankly, his brain was about as healthy as the cow you’re currently eating.”  
  
Quentin scoffs, putting his own sandwich down onto wax paper. “Bill, this isn’t much to work with.”

“How did he get the kids in the cars? He looked like a Night of the Living Dead background actor. They woulda run screaming the moment he pulled up, and we know nobody heard any of the abductions. The kid’s spent the last ten years privately trying to solve the case. Why would he bother, unless he thinks he’s going to find something to absolve him?” Bill sighs. “You know Doctor Lizbon?”  
  
“Yeah, Kathy.” Bill wonders if she’s asked everyone but him to call her by a more familiar name.  
  
“She hated Holden’s guts. Knew the Ruperts family, and she knew Missy. She got sick of Holden’s denials, so she put a picture of Missy on her desk. A candid, none of the airbrushing that went on in that school photo that got circulated. Holden didn’t even recognize it.”  
  
“She was sure?” Ziezel asks, intently.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Quentin’s jaw locks up with thought. He stares over at the dark TV across from his couch. “They did fire me pretty fucking quick. I figured it was because I lied about why I wanted to see Mary. Turns out her daughter moved out a long time ago.”

“Your cover story was that you were trying to screw Mary’s daughter?”  
  
Quentin glowers. “Her daughter used to be friendly with Miriam, thank you very much.”  
  
“Miriam?”  
  
“ _My_ kid.”  
  
“Right. The one in New York who’s gonna courier you a bagel.”  
  
“That’s her,” Quentin murmurs, giving in to a smile. “Didn’t think Maddy Creighton was exactly headed for college, but she must have scraped in. Doesn’t live there anymore. So the lie was pretty dead in the water when they pulled me up on it. Put me straight on administrative leave pending official dismissal. I swear that bastard Crompton enjoyed telling me to hand in my gun and badge.”  
  
“You didn’t know her dad was police?” Bill asks, frowning.  
  
“He was retired. And she was just one of my daughter's idiot friends. Didn’t pay them much attention except they were getting Miriam into trouble.”  
  
Bill starts on his sandwich again. “I need the crime scene sign in for Holden’s place, where the plastic bags were found.”  
  
“So you agree with Ford? You think it’s not just a shoddy investigation, you think the culprit is one of ours?”  
  
_One of yours,_ Bill internally quibbles. “I do.”  
  
“Well, archives is a couple of doors down from the precinct. In the old iron works basement. I could probably still get in. They know me pretty well, seeing as I’ve been digging around in the Ford files for the last couple of months.”  
  
“You’d do that?” Bill asks, intently.  
  
“I’d think about it.”  
  
“There’s apple cake in the bag, too.”  
  
“This is why you’re FBI, and I’m unemployed,” Ziezel says with a self-effacing smile.

 

 

Bill smokes in his hire car as Ziezel descends too fast out of the police building. He’s showered and out of the barely-closed bathrobe, into work wear. An empty holster under his suit jacket, no badge in his breast pocket. It doesn’t look like he required identification. Under one elbow is a thick document wallet. Bill stubs the cigarette, rounding the car and opening the boot. They are both jittering silent as they drive off, then Quentin breaks the tension with an ecstatic whistle.  
  
“I feel like Jesse fucking James.”  
  
“What’d you get?”  
  
“A couple hundred thousand cash and a diamond the size of a newborn’s skull. ...not funny? Xeroxes of the sign-in and sign-out logs. I counted the number of pages in the tip sheets, wrote that down too. No chance I’d be able to copy all of those before the week was out. It was two full boxes of reports.”

Bill scowls absentmindedly at the car pulling out in front of him. So, he’ll know if something has gone missing, but not what. That’s if the killer hasn’t already disposed of any incriminating tips. He moulds his expression back to a smile as he looks over. “Good work.”  
  
“Can’t fire me again, can they?”  
  
“They can probably arrest you if they figure it out.”  
  
“Hah. ...wait, really? I'm just on administrative leave.”  
  
“I mean, you’re technically a citizen who just stole police evidence. ...don’t worry. They’re not going to do that. The less attention they can draw, the better. You’re well-spoken, unflappable, face for TV. The last person they want live on air, telling everyone who’ll listen about a police conspiracy.”  
  
“Easy for you to say,” Ziezel complains.  
  
“If they arrest you, I will make sure the FBI personally intervenes. Call you a federal witness and get you put up in a four star hotel for your own protection. All the room service you can order,” Bill promises, pulling up outside Ziezel’s apartment. The car idles as Bill turns to speak very seriously. “You are the only cop in Madison I can guarantee is gonna have a job when the month is out. Now go home and eat your fucking apple cake. I have a flight to catch.”


	10. Chapter 10

Bill does his best to occupy his home, and his office at Quantico. His tense back stooped to do dishes after dinner, shoulders hunched in bedding beside Nancy, his files spread all over his desk at home. He does long hours at Quantico, submitting paperwork in the form of dozens of requests for personnel, departmental funding, legal support, all peppered with his needy signatures. He tries to ground himself physically but he cannot. He is in the wind, as the case crawls and rots beneath him.

Two phone calls later, and Wendy is still unconvinced. If that wasn’t enough, she is entirely reasonable with her doubts. He has yet to hear back about the investigative team he is trying to wrangle together. The world is heavy with consequence in Madison. Here, life is thin and non-tactile. A short conversation with Lizbon, to arrange a call from Holden, is the closest he gets to an in-body-experience since he flew back to the state.

Wendy agrees to conference call in on Bill’s appointment with Holden. Another mediator for Holden’s sway on him. Bill tells himself this is teamwork, and not subconscious desperation to resist closeness to Ford. She calls at five minutes to ten. There’s no idle chit-chat. Wendy has questions about the legal scope of his investigation, which Bill does his best to answer. He’s forced to concede uncertainty in many areas. He places her on hold with two minutes til the expected call, and waits for Holden.

 

 

The long-anticipated phone call still manages to startle him. He accepts the collect charges from Winnebago, and the connection crackles to life.  
  
“Holden,” Bill greets, right off the bat. He is energized immediately.  
  
He can hear a smile in the younger man’s voice. A brightness and optimism that he wouldn’t have believed Holden Ford capable of. “Hello, Special Agent Tench. Hope a call from a convicted felon isn’t a black mark on your personnel file.”  
  
Bill can feel a dangerous desire to return the camaraderie. Not in front of Wendy. He becomes direct in retaliation to his own emotions. “Doctor Carr is on the other line. She wants to-- to continue our interview, I suppose.”  
  
“I see,” Holden says placidly.  
  
Bill feels a certain withdrawal from Holden as he adds Wendy’s line. The uneven triumvirate reunites.  
  
“Hello, Holden,” Wendy begins.  
  
“Hello, Doctor Carr,” Holden eases into the conversation. “Bill’s been filling you in, I gather. Explaining the structure of his investigation.”  
  
“He has.”  
  
“...but you have doubts as to whether the investigation is necessary at all,” Holden asserts.  
  
“I don’t feel as if the evidence has swayed me into believing you’re innocent, Holden, though I can neither confidently assert your guilt.”  
  
“Okay,” Holden responds, a touch glum.

“But innocent or guilty, you’ve been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. The police obviously conducted an unethical interviewing method to extract a confession. From an ethical standpoint, I would like to see that righted. But the murderer overhearing your arrest, sidling past colleagues, handing you such condemning information on the case? It seems unlikely.” Wendy seems to catch herself being overly harsh. “I’m willing to assist in this investigation in deference to Bill’s judgment.”  
  
There’s a buzzing nothingness from Holden’s connection. “Thanks.”  
  
“I wouldn’t go thanking me yet,” Wendy replies evenly.  
  
“I-- I mean it. An open mind is more than I’ve come to expect.” 

Wendy deftly shifts the topic away from sentiment. “Talk me through your theories on the psychology of the killer. Do you think these kills were his first? The typical pattern of repeated violence is not this rigidly stable. Current mainstream criminal psychology all deals with escalation.”  
  
“I’ve been through the missing person’s in Madison. I don’t think the police could have missed another duplicate crime,” Holden says. “And I think it’s the first time he utilized the abduction method he did. Let me explain: his MO seems so organized, so specific, that I cannot see it being a spur of the moment decision. I think he planned it out. Fantasized about it. Ruminated upon the act. He toiled beneath an ever present temptation.”  
  
“What bridged the gap between fantasy and reality? Why did he kill Jessica Roe?”  
  
“Stress. Of some kind.”  
  
“So you don’t think there’s an initial attempt? Perhaps a scenario that he found less satisfying?”  
  
“That could be the case. Or a crime in which he was almost caught. This elaborate kidnapping and body disposal was a way of easing those anxieties.” 

“You think he could have another victim.”  
  
“He could have multiple other victims, but I-- I suspect he kills largely out of necessity. He may have victims who were sexually abused, but who survived him. The ability to commit these awful acts unfettered drove him to kill his victims. He may not even derive sexual pleasure from the murder.”  
  
“What makes you think that?” Wendy asks simply.  
  
“Lack of desecration of Missy Rupert’s body. The routineness of her burial. The murder method.”  
  
“The murder method?” Bill finally interjects.  
  
“Yes. She was restrained. Easy to kill, if a little girl wasn’t already vulnerable enough. But he took a thick, opaque garbage bag, placed it over her face, and smothered her with it. They found the specks of inhaled plastic in her lungs-- you both know that, sorry, I’m not used to explaining myself to experts. My point is, he wouldn’t have been able to see her expression. He wouldn’t see the life loss occurring, which is usually the apex of gratification for killers aroused when committing homicide. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen, to be beheld as a monster. ...I’d liken it to shrouded bodies at a crime scene indicating the murderer experienced guilt, oftentimes pointing to a personal connection to the victim. Missy was killed quickly, cleanly. Mercifully, in the killer’s eyes. I don’t think he enjoyed killing her.” Holden’s line goes quiet, like he’s finally hearing himself. The three-way call crackles like woodfire.

“Obviously, I’m not the expert here. That would be you, Bill, and you, Doctor Carr. But I have studied this case near exhaustively, and I’ve had a lot of time to coalesce opinions.”  
  
“You’ve studied criminal psychology fairly exhaustively too, from the sound of it,” Wendy says, unswayed by the show of humility.  
  
“Oh, no. Only self-directed reading. I’ve never really _studied_ any of this. I wish I-- I mean, your area of study is fascinating. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on this case.”  
  
Bill can’t decide whether Holden is extending an olive branch, or dangling bait. Wendy pays no heed to Holden’s attempt to guide conversation. “Bill said you believed that the missing girls may have been a stand in, of sorts. I suppose that ties into your theory of the smothering indicating a murderer with a guilty conscience.”  
  
“Yes. He wants to kill, and he doesn’t want to kill. He wants to protect, and to destroy,” Holden says, distant as if underwater. Then he’s bubbling away at the polite surface exchange. “Sorry. That’s not very scientific. He is callous and driven by narcissistic self-gratification, but I think he has an intimate emotional connection to his victims. And because I’m certain they’re strangers to him, whatever amity he is projecting upon them has another source. If you could find that-- that first kill, or that family member he _didn’t_ kill, or the inciting incident that gave rise to these sexual fantasies--”  
  
“We can’t index the entire, private, personal biography of every single policeman on your list, Holden,” Bill counters. “Or even those just in the crime scene logs. We don’t have the manpower. Not to mention, reading so deeply into Missy Ruperts’ murder flies in the face of your assertion that this murder was an aberration driven by urgency and necessity.”

“You’re right,” Holden concedes. To Bill’s dinted pride, the young man sounds impressed by the FBI agent raising a valid point.  “But it’s the only concrete murder we have to examine. Until we find the other bodies--” Holden’s voice drops off. There’s indiscernible babble, Holden perhaps protesting something. Then the line from Winnebago Medical Health Institute drops with a crackle.  
  
Wendy concludes the contemplation with a sigh. “Well. I suppose that’s it, unless he calls back.”  
  
“Lizbon said his phone time is very limited.”  
  
Wendy hums. “He’s very manipulative.”  
  
“Yeah.” _But can you blame him?_  
  
Wendy’s coldness lapses. “You can ensure he isn’t mistreated while you continue your investigation?”  
  
“So you think he’s innocent?”  
  
“I think he is vulnerable. _If_ he’s innocent, he’s a liability to whoever perpetuated the cover-up. And they are law enforcement, too. When you threatened to have him returned to--”  
  
“I apologized,” Bill protests.  
  
“Someone else might be more serious about making Holden’s life insufferable. Not just your murderer. Anyone involved in the cover-up would have reason to want Holden scared into compliance.”

“That facility is probably the safest place for him to be,” Bill says, though it rings false. His authority in Winnebago is perpetuated largely by assumptions and bluster. If challenged, it will come to lawyers and court orders, and he knows that his position teeters upon shaky evidentiary support. “Besides, I’m not actually sure you can scare Holden Ford into compliance.”  
  
“Bill.”  
  
“Holden can call me,” Bill says. He’s distracted, frowning at the scrawled names of the sign in sheet. The photocopy has been annotated with the time that the black plastic bags were found. The scene was gone over initially, but the bags were only found tucked into wardrobe’s highest shelf several hours into the search. The fact is, he isn’t convinced these sheets were taken seriously. One female officer signs out, but not in. Another policeman, a detective, apparently spent less than two minutes on the scene. That’s post-hoc paperwork if ever he’s seen it. He’s not even confident that his murderer’s name is here at all. Holden is going to take this badly. “I’ll-- I know there’s some sympathetic nurses there. I’ll give them a contact number so if anyone from Madison Homicide starts in on Holden, they can reach out.”

“When are you going back to Madison?” Wendy asks thoughtfully.  
  
“When my investigation is approved. I can’t be more specific than that. It’s out of my hands. ...you’ll keep consulting?”  
  
Wendy’s breathing sounds laboured with restraint. “Yes. But--” and she doesn’t reach her point. She clicks her tongue, in stifled protest. “Bill, it’s good to care about cases. In fact, when I first met you, your ability to empathize with victims of crimes shone through your, well, standoffish manners. You were relentless not because you sought acclaim or because your manhood was staked in besting the criminals you pursued. You just-- you just care. Almost every other member of law enforcement dealing with crimes this awful has managed to compartmentalize themselves from their work. It’s a coping mechanism. One that I haven’t seen from you. You have somehow gone your entire career actually invested in the victims of violent crimes--”  
  
“Maybe you’ve just met asshole cops,” Bill says abruptly. She seems to think she’s complimenting his moral standing, but he finds himself offended. Wendy makes him sound stupid.  
  
“No. There are good people in law enforcement, who do good work, but in day-to-day operations, they do not do it for good reasons. They motivate with anger, with hatred, with loathing. I don’t think many humans have the emotional stamina to approach cases as you do.” She sighs again. “Holden Ford, guilty or innocent, will exploit that.” 

“I’m aware that he will try to do that,” Bill returns flatly.  
  
“Why don’t you hand the case off?”  
  
“Because nobody else will pursue it. There is no clamouring to re-open solved homicides, Wendy.”  
  
He can hear her frowning into her phone handset. “Please be careful.”  
  
“I am approaching this cautiously.”  
  
“Holden Ford seems to have no barriers to empathizing with awful people. Now, that isn’t to say this trait necessarily makes him guilty. It’s a very useful investigative tool, and I’m sure the insight is especially valuable to you, as you approach cases so staunchly from the side of the victim.” She’s quiet. “You want to continue to interview him. You want to work _with_ him. That’s dangerously exposed, Bill. You should make sure he isn’t twisting you into a legally compromising position. Tell him not to talk to a lawyer until your investigation is resolved. Because if this investigation stalls too long for his liking, or if you find evidence that convinces you that Holden is guilty, he will use any makeshift weapons to drag you down with him.”  
  
The hypothetical betrayal smarts like chemical smoke down his throat. Some deluded part of him wants to tell her that Holden wouldn’t do that. Maybe he _is_ stupid. “Okay.”  
  
Wendy’s next question comes relieved. She hates broaching below professional relationships as much as he does. “May I have Doctor Lizbon’s contact information?”

 

 

Bill takes an early lunch. He hides in a cloud of cigarette smoke by the cafeteria window, picking at the dry corned beef sandwich. Wistfully he recalls the sweet-savoury haze of cold cuts and pickle brine, wafting over Max’s counter. The FBI mess hall reeks of stale garlic powder from the sheet lasagna, and the staining tobacco he is himself contributing to.  
  
A few colleagues intrude into his brooding, snippets of practical conversation. Richard Sachs wants him to talk criminal psych at a roundtable about a failed plane hijacking. Peter Rathman wants a golf course recommendation for his long weekend in Hawaii. Bill curtails the social exchanges with unforgiving directness, isolating himself in the humdrum hall. He can imagine Holden in this cafeteria. Sitting alone, imbedded in a thick file on some un-stomachable murder, chewing away at his brown-bagged lunch. The green lawns of Quantico's grounds remind him of Winnebago Mental Health Institute. It’s as if his visual cortex is cleaved in two, half occupying his physical reality, half boldy abandoned in Madison, Wisconsin.  
  
The phantasmic Holden occupies Bill’s personal space in the seat opposite. They confer in that miserable cell, and in this miserable cafeteria.

 

 

He trudges back inside his disorganized office, immediately bothered by a red flicker. His phone informs him of an unheard message. He expects Wendy gutting him with an indicting verbal postscript, but it’s Unit Chief Shepard, telling him to come by at two. Not what he wanted to hear. Approval comes in short phone calls. Rejection comes in the form of laborious meetings.  
  
He shows up with his thick files of information, visually compensating for his lack of tangible evidence. Shepard sits stony-faced behind the large desk as Bill lets himself in. Not what he wanted to see, either. The beration begins immediately. Bill argues his case, but he finds himself ineffectual, swayed so much by lived experience that communicable justification fails him.

“You have no evidence of wrongdoing by the police other than barely admissible testimony, that I’m sure will be denied when it comes to formal interviews. This case is _flimsy_ , Bill. You know better than bringing this to legal. You expect any judge in this country to buy that by sheer coincidence, the real murderer managed to make it into Ford’s interrogation to plant all that information?” Shepard finishes.  
  
It’s a well-summarized beatdown. Bill’s frown is cemented on. Shepard is right. Wendy was right. It’s a monumental coincidence, the kind he’d latch onto in an investigation as a clue of misinformation. Holden happened to get arrested by a corrupt cop with a direct line to another corrupt cop, with a direct line to the murderer himself.  
  
He tries to find an internal logic to the events. Maybe the murderer just exploited his astronomical good luck. ...maybe Mary Creighton arresting Holden was no coincidence at all. There’s nothing tangible to suggest that Mary was already onto Holden. But the entire tableau is a settled, sinister performance. The boy unwittingly posed as a villain too far in advance. Someone had tipped off the police about Holden. A medical worker who heard Holden raving about his amateur investigation, a neighbour, perhaps his own mother.

Bill is suddenly certain that the arrest was no coincidence. But something’s off about the timeline of events. Then the FBI agent is finally in own body. His twisting, cramping body, guts churning like a coiling constrictor. The awful realization sets in like stomach cancer.  
  
“I have to go.”  
  
“We’re-- we’re not done, Bill. I can’t approve this.”  
  
“I know. Not enough evidence.”  
  
“Look,” Shepard says, rounding the desk, all caught up in his firm-but-fair act. “I trust your instincts. If you say he’s innocent, he’s innocent. But this isn’t Mississippi, 1964. What you’ve given me does not even approach the burden of proof you’d need to bring together a multi-man taskforce. You’re investigating a decade old crime. A _solved_ crime, per our records.”  
  
Bill backs up, halfway out the door. “You want more evidence, I’m gonna go get it for you. Sir.”  
  
“You’re going back to Wisconsin?”  
  
Bill nods his tension-locked jaw, grinds out an explanation: “That’s where the murderer is.”


	11. Chapter 11

Bill goes to Wisconsin.  
  
He spends five hours there, most of it in tight counsel with his not-quite-partner, Holden. He leaves Winnebago, stops at Quentin’s apartment. He borrows the phone to book a flight to New York City. He sleeps an hour on the plane, and then another handful in the airport motel a block from JFK. He wakes early, takes a taxi to Brooklyn, and walks a few blocks in the hazy, waking city until he finds the address he’s looking for.

Bill scales the concrete steps, knocks hard on the apartment’s door, waits, knocks again. It’s yanked inward by a frowning woman. She’s tall like her father, but still manages looks younger than she must be. Her features look childlike too, until she steps into the light and he sees the sharpness of her jawline. Her dark hair is bobbed at her ear lobes which Bill initially mistakes for fashionably gamine, and then decides is some kind of anti-establishment sentiment. Her t-shirt says ‘DIE DIE KILL’, and her loose black denim shorts appear to be mens’. She has the look of slept-in makeup, slightly racoonish. The moment she sizes Bill up, her outlook becomes impressively intimidating for her slight figure.  
  
“Is there a problem?” she says. From her tone, she has already has him pinned down as law enforcement.  
  
“Maddy?”  
  
“Who’s asking?” she replies, unfriendly.  
  
“Bill Tench. I work for the FBI.”  
  
She narrows her dark eyes further. “How did you get my address?”  
  
“I asked Miriam Ziezel.”  
  
Her lips tighten into a betrayed scowl, and steps back to close the door in his face.  
  
“I’m trying to put your father in prison for the rest of his life,” Bill informs her abruptly.

The door stays open. “You’re investigating Greg?”  
  
“Yes. Can we talk?”  
  
Her teeth are edge to edge. “My roommate is inside,” she mutters. “My train to class is in half an hour.”  
  
“What are you studying?”  
  
“Masters in electrical engineering,” she says, folding her arms.  
  
Bill raises an eyebrow. “Electrical-- okay. Can we arrange a time to talk after you’re done with class?”  
  
“Who did he hurt?”  
  
“Pardon me?”  
  
“Oh, you heard me,” she returns. “Fuck, okay. Let me grab some shoes and we’ll go-- somewhere-- and talk.” She closes the door abruptly. The corridor is deathly quiet.

 

 

Bill waits outside smoking, until Maddy emerges in combat boots, with a backpack slung carelessly over her shoulder. She presses heavy framed sunglasses up her nose.  
  
“You wear that t-shirt to class?” Bill asks, unable to help himself. Bad move. She becomes withering.  
  
“It’s a band shirt. Can I see your badge?”  
  
Bill fishes it out of his jacket pocket, but pauses. “Why?”  
  
“Because I wanna make sure my asshole father didn’t send you to harass me.”  
  
Bill extends it, never quite letting go. “Miriam said you weren’t on good terms.”  
  
“Did she?” Maddy asks bitterly. “Teach me to talk to my fucking roommates.”  
  
“Well, I didn’t want to come here if you were going to call your father and tell him about my investigation. She said-- and I’m pretty much quoting-- that if anyone deserved the chance to hammer the nails deep into that bastard’s coffin, it was you.”  
  
“I haven’t spoken to him in eight years,” she murmurs, toying with the lock. “Okay. Let’s--” she screws her eyes closed, shuddering herself back to conversation. “Okay. Let’s go get breakfast. You’re really going to put him in prison?” she asks, a tiny sneer starting.  
  
“Yes,” Bill says very seriously.  
  
She smiles, finally. It is black revenge.

 

 

She attests that the cafe across the road is private, which it is, no doubt to allow plausible deniability for the drug use inside. Anywhere that has a wooden bead curtain entryway has a high likelihood of accomodating dope fiends. The interior is all music show posters and anti-Nuclear propaganda, with a large Che Guevara mural above their booth. Bill folds his arms, inapposite and itchingly aware of dark looks from other patrons. But he’s not going to drag some kid into the New York FBI headquarters. Holden had been right. Make it a conversation on equal footing. She has plenty of reason to distrust male authority figures, especially those in law enforcement.  
  
Maddy seems oddly calm opposite him, crumbling the muffin between her fingers impatiently, waiting for the waitress to finish pouring the coffee. “So. You never told me who he hurt,” she says intently.  
  
“I believe the four girls who were murdered in Madison in ‘65 and ‘67 were victims of your father,” Bill says, with no preamble. 

Maddy’s hand shakes. She picks up and puts down her coffee, the dark liquid sloshing around the old white china. “I-- no. The murderer confessed. My mother was there when he confessed.”  
  
“It was coerced confession.”  
  
She seems to shrink even smaller in the high-backed wooden booth. “I called them. I called the police, I told them it was Greg--” she stops speaking. He can see her fists underneath the table clench, unclench, rapid and helpless. Like a waterlogged moth trying to break surface tension. Bill regrets being so blunt, and is about to apologize when Maddy looks up. She meets his eyes in panicked intensity, the amplification of the thick lenses making her searing stare inescapable. “How do you know?”  
  
“I know he arranged to have Holden arrested, and fed him information that only the murderer could have known. ...I have no real proof. Why did you suspect him?”  
  
“Because I got too old for him,” Maddy says, in a strangely matter-of-fact tone. “And he hated it.”  
  
Bill puts his coffee down. “I--” he starts, sympathetically, and is cut off.  
  
“I told my mom. I told my brothers,” she goes on. Her lips are tugged into an awful sneer, so much older than her features. “And then I called the police when the girls started disappearing. Nobody wanted to hear it.”  
  
“You must have only been--”  
  
“Twelve. And they kept putting me on the line to my fucking father,” she says, pushing the muffin away from her eyeline. “Like it was family business. He told everyone I was a problem child.”

“I’m sorry.”  
  
She shakes her head unhappily, absolving him. “Why now?”  
  
“I was interviewing Holden Ford. Ten years, and he’s never given directions to the other three girls. I went in there determined to break him. ...somehow, he convinced me that he was innocent.”  
  
She stares blindly past Bill. “I bet if you’d been there, you would have listened,” she murmurs.  
  
Bill frowns. “I would have. I don’t know what sort of monster ignores a scared little girl asking for help.”  
  
She nods. She picks up her coffee, sucking in a mouthful, struggling to swallow it. She’s holding the cup protectively close, hiding her skewed lips behind the white and blue ceramic. “I can’t prove it, either.”  
  
“Did your father ever have a brown station wagon?”  
  
She shakes her head.  
  
“Did he have any rooms in the house you weren’t allowed into? A safe he kept locked, or a chest somewhere in his shed?” Bill asks.  
  
She screws her eyes closed. “I don’t think so. He didn’t like me going through his things but--” she drinks her coffee instead of finishing her sentence.  
  
“When did you move out?” Bill questions her, gentler.  
  
“I was sixteen.”  
  
“Where’d you go?”  
  
“I stayed at friends’ places, mostly. Crashed at Miriam's a bit. My aunt’s sometimes. She was my only relative in town.” 

“You told her about your father?”  
  
“No. I couldn’t have dealt-- I could have one more person I loved not believing me. She thought the world of her brother-in-law.”  
  
Bill takes a sip of coffee, then swallows sharply to get out another query. “Was your aunt a doctor? A psychologist?”  
  
Maddy’s frown deepens. “No. But she was a nurse. Why?”  
  
“I think someone informed your father, maybe secondhand through your mother, that Holden Ford was schizophrenic, and obsessed with this case.” Bill adds sugar to his coffee slowly. It churns helplessly towards the dark depths, and his mind follows. She wouldn’t have wanted to violate confidentiality, but she might have told family about a patient blathering about an unsolved kidnapping non-stop. A nurse would have known about Holden’s sensitivity to benzodiazepine, too. Bill’s fingers are dangerously tight around the ceramic as he tastes it.  
  
Maddy considers the proposition. “You could ask her. She still lives in Madison.”  
  
“Do you have her address?”  
  
“She moved, so not off the top of my head. But I think I have a letter from her. I can get it for you.”  
  
Bill nods, trying to convey a more relaxed image. “So you don’t talk much to anyone in Madison?”  
  
“Would you?”  
  
“No.”

Her sneer fades, but there’s a latent, grim determination as she starts back in on the muffin. Bill notices a thick black tattoo on her wrist. Barbed wire crushing in on an anatomical heart. She fixes the neckline of her t-shirt.  
  
“What sort of music does… ‘Die Die Kill’ play?”  
  
She chuckles. “What, gonna check out a show? Brit-Punk. I did sound for them a couple of years back, when they came to New York.”  
  
“You work in sound engineering?”  
  
“I work in all kinds of things.”  
  
He wonders if she’s tacitly admitting to dealing drugs, not that he could care less. “Would you sign an affidavit? It would only go to a judge, and never be public. I’m going to testify to what your mother admitted. I need you to explain what sort of man your father was, and that you informed the police only to have it covered up. ...I need to get a warrant to search your father’s house, and I need to get an innocent man out of prison.”  
  
“No.”  
  
Bill’s lips twist. “Maddy--”  
  
“I’ll come, and I’ll testify. I want to see his face. I want him to _fear_ what I’m about to do to him,” she says, a metallic ring in her words. Like machete being sharpened. It is ungodly between her cherub lips.

 “Are you sure you want to be so close to this whole thing?” Bill asks, conscience flaring.  
  
“I’m already _close_ . I’m trapped in Madison every day of my fucking life. Another five year old girl who never left that town.” She sucks down a breath, picking up her backpack from the booth beside her. “He tried to kill me. We went camping. He used to take me on these lonely trips, make sure I was isolated but-- I was-- I was hitting puberty. Maybe ten or eleven? It was before the girls started going missing, anyway. I’d grown about a foot in six months. I started talking back. I wasn’t his little girl anymore and it was eating him inside out. I woke up with a pillow over my face. I didn’t even know what was happening until he pulled it away, and I could breathe again. He got up and started packing up at once. He didn’t spare me because he _cared_. I think he knew he’d never get away with killing his own daughter.”

 

 

Bill pays for their breakfasts, and walks Maddy back across the busy street. They’re both preoccupied to silence as they step inside her dim apartment. Her roommate is eating cereal in a college sweatshirt, not hiding her dissatisfaction at the intrusion.  
  
Bill smokes by the overburdened ashtray and tries to look out the window. The view is another concrete apartment block, and a glass brick window. He looks at a graphic black and white poster for a movie he’s never heard of, instead. Maddy is away ferreting around in a box under her bed. She comes back with an envelope with her aunt’s address, copies it onto the back of a band flier, and presses it into Bill’s hand. He scans it, not familiar with the suburb, then sees a phone number that he assumes is for this very apartment.  
  
“Tell me when you’ve booked the flights,” Maddy says, following his gaze. “We should go see her together. I’ll convince her to talk,” the young woman says confidently.  
  
Bill spares a glance at the other woman in the shared area. She’s piling cheerios onto her spoon, other hand idly curling strands of her afro. Listening, and pretending not to.  
  
“You’re sure you can fly out tonight?” he asks Maddy, backing up towards the door.  
  
“I’ll tell my supervisor it’s a family emergency,” she says with a malicious, dead smile.

 

 

Bill taxis to the Bureau's New York field office, taking control of a small conference room. He books flights for the afternoon, deciding to fly with Maddy out of a sense of protectiveness. He leaves a message at her machine. He bounces around a few options for legal assistance on his case, settles on a man he knows well: Special Agent Al Sweeney, an African American ex-prosecutor with a healthy skepticism for local police. He has passed the bar in several states, and Bill is grateful to be reminded that Wisconsin is one of them. Bill talks him through the case, about a thousand times easier now that he has the evidentiary support of an enthusiastic witness, and several new avenues of investigation. Al agrees to fly out to Madison.  
  
He calls Wendy next, launches into an uninterrupted diatribe on Greg Creighton, and begs her to come to Madison to talk the judge through the criminal psychology that links familial child abuse to the Ruperts’ murder. Holden’s talking points need to be regurgitated by an expert to have legal sway. Wendy is supposed to lecture all day, for the next four days. She tells him she’ll try, but the mettle of her voice implies to him that come hell or highwater, she’ll be by his side in the warrant hearing.

He gets a coffee, and a ham and cheese sandwich, and goes by the office of the Special Agent in Charge to thank him personally. Only then does he call Unit Chief Shepard. Bill keeps the triumph out of his tone, sticking to neutral terms and tries to keep his first person pluralized. But there’s no pushback. He’s been reliable enough, for long enough, that Shepard simply hums agreement and tells him to make sure none of his witnesses talk to the press.  
  
Nancy will be at work, and she already knows he’s away for the next few nights. He’ll call her when he’s landed in Wisconsin. His frantic energy has petered down, and exhaustion is catching up. He slumps into cushioned chairs of the conference room and wishes he could tell Holden all about Maddy Creighton.

 

 

Maddy stays buried in a dense textbook on the flight. He thinks he’s done something to upset her until they’re in the taxi towards the booked motel. He doesn’t want the young woman further than a door away from him, if she’s right about Greg having no qualms killing his own blood. In the back of the taxi, she folds the book away, and he can see how white her knuckles are on the spine.  
  
“I hate being back here,” she tells him, quietly. Bill decides the silence is not anger, it is trepidation.  
  
“Are you okay?”  
  
She shakes her head. “I’ve gotta do this anyway. For those girls. For me.”  
  
“ ...I’m going to keep you safe, Maddy. I promise.”  
  
She blinks a few times, and stows the book away. “Call me Em. Everyone calls me Em in New York.”  
  
“Okay. Em.”  
  
“I dropped the Creighton. People started calling me MT, so I went by Em.”  
  
“Empty?” Bill echoes, frowning.  
  
“Maddy Theresa. Then MT, when I’m doing gigs,” she says. She forces a smile, queasy and brief. She looks out the car window as they pass a McDonald’s arch. “God, I hate this town.”

They reach the motel, and their two separate rooms, which Bill will pay for out of pocket if the accountant quibbles. He’d prefer her in his hawkish eye-line, but he’s not so insensitive to force her to sleep in the same room as a strange man. When Wendy comes, maybe he’ll be able to put them up together. Maybe have her stay with Doctor Lizbon. At least _she_ has a firearm.  
  
He picks up some pizza for the young woman, drops it off and makes a joke about not wearing any band t-shirts when they go to testify to a judge. The darkness is crowding in on the motel, dragging Bill’s mood down with it. He lets himself into his own room, sagging into bed, ready to sleep in his suit. No. Dammit. His wife. He rolls upright, pinching the bridge of his nose, readying himself for another bout of guilt-tripping. She picks up quickly, and Bill struggles to find the words to greet the woman he’s known so long. 

“Bill? Is that you?” she asks.  
  
“Hey, Nancy.”  
  
“Doctor Carr just called. She wanted your number.”  
  
“Wendy called?” Bill says. He’s tired, but not tired enough to miss the urgency in his wife’s tone.  
  
“That innocent man, apparently the police are interviewing him.”  
  
“Dammit-- Nancy, I’m going to have to call you back.”  
  
“Okay. Bill, remember, be safe,” she insists.  
  
“I will. I love you,” he says, hanging up abruptly. He calls Wendy’s number.

“What’s happening?” he asks without introduction.  
  
“That nurse tried to call you, and when she couldn’t get hold of you, she called Kathy. Some men came in and insisted on interviewing Holden. One was a detective from homicide who has interviewed Holden before. Uh, I wrote it-- Detective Bradshaw, the nurse is pretty sure. She didn’t know the other man.”  
  
“Dammit. Okay. How long did they interview him for--”  
  
“Bill, that’s just it. They took him out of Winnebago and into police custody. They claimed he was going to show them to the last three bodies.”  
  
“What? _What?_ When did this happen?”  
  
“An hour ago. Maybe a little less.”  
  
“It’s fucking _nighttime_ , how did they buy that--”  
  
“They’re police, Bill. Most people are a little afraid to argue back.”

“So where’s Holden now?”  
  
“I don’t know. Kathy doesn’t know. I _told_ you to keep him--”  
  
“Wendy! Not. Now.”  
  
“You’re right,” she rushes out. “But, _goddammit_ , Bill. My best guess is, they plan to take him out to the bodies, say Holden showed them to the burial sites to quell any questions about his guilt, and then-- and then something bad happens to Holden Ford. They back each other up that he attacked them. That they killed him in self-defence.”  
  
“What about the other detective? Holden could just tell him--”  
  
“We have no reason to believe these murders were committed by only one man, Bill.”  
  
The freshly consumed, greasy pizza is up his throat. He tries to speak past it, but his oesophagus is biled and clogging. He's on his feet, without realizing he's moved. Exhaustion is replaced by drug-like adrenaline as the puzzle Bill has been poring over is suddenly, hideously, completed. The planted confessional details, that Deputy Greg Creighton wasn’t even present for. The bindings, the smothering. The fucking caramel corn. “Wendy, I--”  
  
“Go.”


	12. Chapter 12

His fist hits Em’s door like a jackhammer, rattling the thin wood in its frame. She yanks it inward with equal ferocity, glaring up.  
  
“What?” she asks angrily. Her eyes are narrowed to hide fear.  
  
“I think your father has-- has taken Holden out to where he buried the bodies.”  
  
“If I knew where they were buried I would have told--”  
  
He cuts her off, the adrenaline dump rendering him revelatory. “Where did he take you camping? When he almost-- where was it?”  
  
“...a… a campsite off Squirrel Lake. We went there a couple of times fishing.”  
  
“Okay, where--”  
  
“It wasn’t a real campsite. No amenities or anything. I don’t think we were supposed to camp there, but he liked privacy, you know,” Maddy says, eyes widening as the implication catches her.  
  
“Where was it in relation to the lake? East? West?”  
  
“Near-- I don’t know, I was a kid! Near the lake, but not on it. Maybe a couple of hundred feet from it. East. Roadside. There was this little turn off, then we’d go around the bend and park. None of the roads round there have names. If I went there, maybe I could--”  
  
“Come with me,” he orders, and takes off at a furious jog.

He’d picked a motel near Quentin’s apartment to convene in the morning, but there’s still three blocks between. By the time he makes it to the building, and up the long staircase, he’s winded and neurochemically buzzed with exercise. He can hear Em’s boots a flight or two behind him. He bangs on the door, too loud, again. It’s pulled inward not by the recently fired police detective, but by the distressed, puffy-eyed Doctor Lizbon. Any other time, Bill would be taken aback, but the revelation of a relationship is cast roughly aside in his urgency.  
  
“Bill, did you get Wendy's--” she starts, desperately.  
  
He nods, chest heaving. “Where’s--where’s Quentin?”  
  
“He’s on the phone. Trying to figure out where they’ve taken him.”  
  
Bill pushes past her, into the cramped living room. Quentin is hunched over on the couch, intent on his phone call.  
  
“Do you have a gun?” Bill asks, without preamble.  
  
Quentin stares, lowers the phone. “I handed mine in when they fired me.”  
  
“No personal fire--? Okay, no. Dammit. Hand me that paper,” Bill says, picking a thick marker from the jar of pens by Quentin's phone. 

He can hear Em speaking to Katherine by the door, but he tunes it out to scrawl out the words in block letters. ‘EAST 200FT FROM SQUIRREL LAKE. TURN OFF IS OFF MAIN ROAD. DOWN CURVED DIRT ROAD’. He scowls at the words. Not enough information.  
  
“What are you--” Ziezel starts to enquire.  
  
“Holden might be here. I’m going to go now, and Em-- Maddy is gonna show me the way. It might be where the victims are buried. Do you know Bradshaw?”  
  
“Yeah, he’s an asshole. I think--”  
  
Bill cuts Ziezel off, again. “He is either a murderer or an accessory to murder. Go to the station, find some cops you trust, who feel the same way about the guy, and get them to go here--” he says, throwing the paper in Ziezel’s direction. It misses, and Quentin stoops to pick it up. “I’ll park just before the intersection. You explain the situation. Those two men are both likely armed, and definitely dangerous. Bring whatever passes for a SWAT team down on them. You got it?”  
  
“I should come with you.”  
  
“You don’t even have a gun,” Bill says, tone brooking to argument. “Besides of which, I need you to mobilize whatever you can here. There’s gonna be federal agents in town. You call up Quantico and make sure they are informed of the situation, get anyone we can into town. I don’t wanna have to explain to anyone the swindle those motherfuckers have pulled on Madison PD, you got it? Get the fucking word out. Creighton and Bradshaw are kid killers.”  
  
“Okay, okay,” Quentin reassures.

Bill’s breathing has steadied. He takes stock of the room, and of the task at hand. Em and Katherine are back in the apartment’s living room now. He ignores their questioning stares. “What sort of car do you drive?” he asks Ziezel.  
  
“A Chevy Vega. Remember, we drove to Winnebago--”  
  
“Right. Hey, buy a better fucking car when I get you your job back. Katherine, did you drive?”  
  
“Yeah--”  
  
“Car keys. Please.”  
  
She hands him the Volvo’s keys. “Bill. He came to my house. Detective Bradshaw. He said he was Quentin’s friend. He said Holden was in danger, and he wanted to know--”  
  
“It’s not your fault,” Bill says, though it might well be. He doesn’t have time to be comforting. He turns to the young woman instead. “Em. You’re going to show me the way, but you are not going to be involved in this, okay?” Bill says, smothering the frenetic anger from his gravelly voice.  
  
“...okay.”  
  
“You can direct me to the turn off, right?”  
  
She nods. “Should I take a knife or somethi--”  
  
“No,” Bill cuts in, alarmed. “You’re not going anywhere near this. How far to Squirrel Lake?”  
  
“I don’t know exactly. At least three or four hours.”  
  
“They probably won’t be breaking too many speeding limits. Just lead to more witnesses. So, if we set off now, we might make it there as they do,” Bill says, to Quentin. “You haul ass, okay? Go. Now.”

 Quentin grabs the paper directions takes off out of his apartment. Bill follows him down the staircase beside Em. Once he’s pulling the Volvo out of its tight park, he realizes how much his hands are shivering on the wheel. He forces them under control. He’s the worst sort of emotionally invested. Compromised.  
  
“You’re going to go alone?” Em asks.  
  
“Just until back-up arrives. I'll convince ‘em that we know everything, and that the only way they get out alive is to peacefully lay down their weapons.”  
  
“They’re not going to do that.”  
  
Bill’s jaw sets.  
  
“They’re hunting buddies. I-- they served together. Bill, you should wait for--”  
  
“I served too. And I’m a lot harder to kill than a fucking deer,” Bill cuts her off. He should wait. That would be good protocol. Go and spent half an hour rounding up a team. Half an hour that Holden Ford can't spare. He floors the accelerator through a yellow light. His lips tug into a bitter slash of consideration. Two fucking army vets. _Goddammit._ “Tell me about the place I’m going into. As much detail as you can. Terrain, layout, _anything_ your father might be able to use.”  
  
“Are you going to kill him?” she asks softly.  
  
Bill looks into the seat beside him. Her small, angled face is in sharp relief beneath yellow streetlights. Avian. Like a bird of prey. Maybe more like a downy, freshly hatched thing that birds of prey eat. “If I have to.”  
  
“You make sure he knows I led you to him, when he’s dying,” she says, distinctly predatory. Bill nods and goes back to watching the road.

 

 

Even breaking every speed limit, there’s still hundreds of miles between Bill and the predicted place of Holden’s execution.  
  
Em’s jaw is locked up tight, only speaking to offer directions when they reach unfamiliar intersections.  
  
When they’re back on the open road towards Wisconsin’s forested north, Bill turns again.  
  
“When we get there, I’m going to leave the car by the intersection. You can’t stay in the car. You find some brush fifty feet back, somewhere thick, and hunker down. Whatever you hear, you keep away. Okay?”  
  
“...whatever I hear? If you're screaming for help?”  
  
“If I yell for help, you do fuck all. Stay sat on your ass until the cops-- the decent cops arrive. Then you get up, raise your hands, and you walk slowly out. And no sooner. I mean it, Em. If there’s a firefight, I cannot have your well-being clogging up my judgment. I need you out of the way. I’ve got this. No way they expect anyone to find them. They’ll be off their guard,” Bill says reassuringly. He’s not sure that’s true. Greg Creighton doesn’t strike him as the type to let his guard down. And then there’s the utter unknown in Bradshaw. “What do you know about the Detective?”  
  
“He was Greg’s partner for awhile. He used to come over a lot. They-- he never-- you know--”  
  
Bill’s lips twitch with an apology that he doesn’t voice. He checks the time, and the gas gauge nervously.  
  
“I’ll give you the car keys. If-- if something happens, and they drive off, you wait an hour for the cops to show. If they don’t, you drive back to Madison,” Bill adds. It would be irresponsible not to raise the possibility.

 

 

The gas station he refuels at is echoing out a boppy pop beat. The breakneck rhythm taunts him as he rushes to pump gas. The fumes rise unusually obnoxious. Maybe that’s what has him nauseated, or maybe he cannot stomach the stationary position. He asks the cashier if she’s seen a cop car coming through. She shrugs, points down sarcastically at the magazine she’s reading. Bill scowls.  
  
He drains the purchased coke bottle before he’s even left the premises, tossing it in the trash can by the door. At least the caffeine will keep him vigilant, but it’s no substitute for rest. Then he’s back on the dark road, the Volvo’s continental engine pushed spinning to its mechanical limit by Bill’s impatience. The minutes crawl by, accumulating into hours. Bill can’t even allow himself to think that they took Holden somewhere else. Somewhere closer to Madison. If they did, the kid is dead. Maybe he’s been dead these last three hours of Bill’s furious clamour to save him.

 

 

“Squirrel Lake’s just up here, I’m pretty sure,” Em says, voice breaking Bill out of a strategic daydream. “Maybe a couple of miles.”  
  
Bill slams the breaks on, flicks the headlights off. “You’re sure?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Okay,” Bill says, gritting his teeth. He eases the car into a crawl, relying on just the paltry half-moon lighting to keep on the unsealed road. They continue in bated silence, for another mile at least. The Volvo nudges its way up over a rise, and Bill spots a sign notifying them of the lake to their left.  
  
“Not this one,” Em says in a whisper. Bill continues, coasting down a tiny curve, almost no engine input.  
  
“This one? ...Em?”  
  
“I don’t… think so.”  
  
“It curves.”  
  
“I don’t think so. No.”  
  
Bill hisses between still clenched teeth. He needs the motor again to follow the road’s winding path. He applies the tiniest pressure on the accelerator, winces at the muted hum of an engine. It’s even darker lakeside, with the tall pines flanking the road. They keep driving. Just as Bill is about to suggest doubling back, Em grabs his arm. Her fingers dig like talons.  
  
“Here. Here. Pull over,” she whispers frantically.  
  
He can’t see the turn-off, but he does.

The car crunches its way off the gravel, into the dry grass of the lip. He spots the side road, barely one car wide, curving down amongst the looming monsters of foliage. Bill nudges the car door open, pulling his gun from its holster. He closes the door with equal concentration. The faint click sounds like a snare drum to his oversensitive ears. Em has stayed in the car, and he walks slowly about, to let her out.  
  
“Up there,” he breathes, pointing across the main road to a cluster of dense pine saplings. It must be two in the morning, or close to. It’s cold for the season, especially amongst the brush. He shrugs off his suit jacket, extends it over, and then the car keys. “Remember. Don’t move. Whatever happens.”  
  
Her wide eyes are lightless. She nods attentively before she’s creeping away, finally quiet in the combat boots.  
  
Bill lightly clicks her door shut, realizing the car is still unlocked. Doesn’t matter too much. If it’s not him that makes it back to this road, then he’s dead. He sets off down the dirt road, staying close as he can to the brush on the inside of the curve. His dress shoes fail to grip the slightly dewy grass. He breathes through his nose, continues downhill. His gun is held just below eye height, extended out ready to fire.  
  
It’s combat all over, except that he’d know he had at least one soldier on his six. He’s alone, yet he continues relentlessly. Time in still his enemy.

A tree catches his cheek, and he jerks backwards as if attacked. His heart is a kicksnare against his temple, at his throat. Then he sees it. The shining white of a Madison City Police vehicle. He stops dead, analyzing it through foliage. No movement. The car looks empty. On one side of the dirt road, he can see the flickering surface of Squirrel Lake through slender straight tree trunks. Up the slope beyond the parked car, a flicker of torchlight.  
  
He presses himself back into the scrub, wishing he’d worn black. Everyone else at the agency wears black every goddamn day. But the suit jacket handed off to Em was light grey, as are his pants. The shirt is sky blue. He doesn’t have the time to go dressing up in mud and branches Vietcong style. At least it’s dark. Those two will be acclimated to their torches. He crouches his way over to the car, double-checks the interior in case Holden had been left abandoned inside. That would be too easy. It’s empty, and locked. Bill nudges his way beneath the branches of a young birch tree, and follows the densest line of foliage uphill.

He’s picking his way through a cluster of snagging underbrush when the unmistakable blast of gunfire sounds. He drops, but it’s too distant to be aimed at him. _The kid. Fuck. Fuck._ His heart sinks through his body like mercury. He represses the thought that Holden just died barely fifty feet from him, for fear that it will render him uselessly immobile.  
  
He keeps on upwards, though there’s an unsteadiness to his steps now as he approaches the swinging lights. The plantlife is thinning and Bill must dart from cover to cover. A torch beam swings his way, missing his feet by inches. Not random movement. A systematic search.  
  
Bill recognizes Greg’s deep voice in the darkness beyond. “Where did he fucking go?”  
  
“Relax. I tagged him. He’s not going to make it far. He’s drugged, and he’s bleeding out.”  
  
“Bleeding out? Where’s the fucking blood, then?”  
  
“It’s dark. Soaking in to the soil.”  
  
There’s a dismissive sound from Creighton. “And how’s he gonna make a break for it if he’s that drugged? You didn’t administer that shit properly. I told you not in the neck. Give me the fucking gun.”  
  
_Holden._ Alive. Hurt, but alive. _You magnificent son of a bitch. You slipped ‘em._ And they only brought one gun between them, like the arrogant psychopaths they are. Probably wanted just the police weapon logged into evidence when they explained shooting Holden in self-defence. Bill allows himself the briefest second of smug glee. A torchlight splashes him and the the joy freezes arctic. Bill shuffles back into the conifer, sticks eating through his clothing, jutting into flesh. He sucks air through flared nostrils, inorganically still.

“Down there.” There’s breaking sticks and heavy treads on the slope above him. Then comes a taunting call: “...you want us to drive back and pay a visit to Katherine? Hm? These old widows, they shoot themselves all the time. There one day, gone the next. Bang. Nobody to tend that pretty garden,” calls the other man, who must be Bradshaw. Bill would have seen him at road school, he realizes. Not a stranger, but not someone Bill can bring to mind. He can’t see either face anyway, just two torch beams headed his way.  
  
He stumbles, crouching backwards through the weighty punches of pine branch. He feels blood start behind a scratched ear, as he eases himself behind a heavy trunk, then makes a dash for the next thick brush. He’s retreating reckless in his knowledge that Holden doesn’t need to be saved. If he can make it back to the car-- and he’s misjudged. Suddenly there’s no scrub ahead of him, just the grassy slope, a couple of birch trees, and lapping water. He’s edged downhill at the wrong angle. Jesus Christ.

He sucks in a pacifying breath, wills himself calm. Those two think he’s Holden, drugged, shot, probably cuffed. They don’t think he has a gun. And they’re going to want to stage the crime scene for the murder. He has the edge of surprise over these men. He can see the torches moving. He knows where they are, they don’t know where he is.  
  
Bradshaw is still yelling: “Come on out, Ford.” 

Bill makes a split second decision, straightens, takes several rushed steps uphill, trying to cover as much ground as possible. He has to be out of their torch beam. If they know he’s outnumbered, there’s no chance they surrender. He could start firing, but in the darkness the men with torches have a huge advantage. He can’t see the bodies he’d have to hit. Just their lights, edging around the scrub he’d seconds ago been hidden amongst.  
  
“FBI, drop the weapon, you’re surrounded!” he roars.  
  
One of the torches is dropped, tumbling, pointing over the stark texturing of leaves and grass into murky lake water. The other goes out, abruptly. Bill squints, making out two figures, one much closer. And then something bright is soaring his way, and he jerks aside as the lit torch misses him by a few feet. It shatters against a tree but doesn’t extinguish. Bill has the firearm up, looses an unsighted shot at the dark figure bull-rushing him. He’s not sure if he hits his target. The collision is a shoulder to his guts, barrelling him up the slope.

He rolls with the impact, gun in hand, but his assailant still has his feet. A boot crunches down on his grip, trigger finger splintering with red-hot agony. He howls, releasing the weapon, knocking it downhill and away from the grasping fingers of the man towering above him. Bill lunges up, grabbing ankles and tackling Bradshaw over.  
  
Creighton still has his gun. If he’s a separate target, he’ll be riddled with bullets. In fact, with a glance back, he sees Creighton picking up his torch, aiming it towards the wrestling men. Bill pulls himself onto Bradshaw’s back, trying to get a bicep under the man’s chin, flattening him out as a body shield. There’s resistance from the policeman, a smaller physique, but well trained. An effectively tucked chin to ensure Bill can’t choke him unconscious, squirming attempts to get away.  
  
Creighton is ascending the slope, torchlight bobbing with each long stride. Before Bill can really think about lunging for his gun to return the shortly incoming shots, Creighton’s torch is on the ground again. It spins, pointing uphill on a jaunty angle. And half-lit is Holden Ford, rising from the scrub like a folklore wendigo. He’s stark amongst shadow in his familiar white t-shirt, drenched all about his right shoulder with slick black. Not black. Dark red. Shit, that’s a lot of blood. Even in the chaos, Bill manages to be concerned.

Holden has hold of Creighton’s gun arm, grappling desperately to keep the firearm turned down.  
  
“You little fucking bastard--” Greg growls. His other hand is around Holden’s throat, tossing him up into a sickening crunch against embankment. Bill stops breathing for a moment, but sees Holden has managed to keep his grip, and Greg is dragged down with the younger man. Holden fights like a madman, even seriously wounded. No doubt spent a lot of his young life fighting back against stronger men. The gun seems to have spilled free, though Bill can no longer distinguish fine detail of the unfolding skirmish. A limb is flung out, though he can’t tell from which man. He hears a splash in the lake below, and then Greg swearing. The gun. _Good boy._ But victory is short lived. There’s a crunching flesh, and Greg is up above Holden. He is illuminated again by the beam of torchlight. A bristling, bloody moustache above sneering lips.  
  
“You--” he never gets to insult Holden. There’s a lashed kick upright, flush against his jaw. His head snaps back like a whip’s sharp tip. Bill doesn’t see if he falls, if he’s knocked out cold.

Bradshaw may have also been distracted by the fight, but he’s not nearly as emotionally compromised as Bill. The policeman uses the inattention to squirm almost fully about, a knee driving into Bill’s gut, pushing himself above the FBI agent. Bill’s exhausted, screaming arms relinquish their imperative. The man rears up overhead, and then down with brutal swiftness. The punch hits Bill’s brow, tossing his head as if only loosely tethered to the stocky build below.  
  
It doesn’t hurt very much, which Bill registers as an alarming symptom. There’s barely anything overhead to see, just a gradient of tree branches as they’re brushed less and less by indirect torchlight. Still, the details he can pick are swaying and sparkling dangerously. He tries to buck the man off. There’s another blow, this one colliding with his jaw. Bradshaw looms up again, fist raised. Then his head explodes deafeningly. His open eyes bulge above a maw of nothingness where his nose was. Bill is drenched in wet, deliquesced body. It collapses and coats him, like he’s stepped into warm storm sleet. The body-- it is just a body now-- tumbles to his left. Bill crawls crazed with disgust out from underneath.

He stares up wildly. Holden is silhouetted over him, unknowable. There’s glinting white torchlight off the cuffs on his wrists and Bill’s gun in his hand. The young man takes in the fallen FBI agent and turns on a step. Holden paces over to the other body-- no, this one isn’t a body, it’s squirming upright.  
  
“Stay down. Or I will shoot you in your fucking head. Stay still,” Holden is saying, sounding bizarrely calm. “Okay? Okay, Greg? Do you know how bad I want to shoot you in your fucking head? Ten years of suffering, I owe you back. Ten years that I thought about-- about what I would do.”  
  
Bill crawls to the nearest birch trunk, supporting himself up. He steps away from the tree unsteadily. “Holden. Give me the gun.”  
  
Holden doesn’t turn, but from his barbed tone, he’s clearly speaking to Bill. “You said you’d-- you fucking bastard. You said you’d protect me.”  
  
“Holden,” Bill intones, more authoritatively than he feels. “The gun.”

Holden stumbles, and Bill closes the gap. He takes the firearm out of the shaking, pale hands with no resistance. His trigger finger is too damaged to fire with, so he has an uncomfortable left-handed grip instead. Holden sinks to the forest floor.  
  
“Who cuffed you? Holden?”  
  
Holden has gone unresponsive. He shivers and prickles, like mid-fight cat, and then throws up between his legs. He’s not actually a psychopath, Bill is reassured. The FBI agent leans down to the young man’s uninjured shoulder, rubbing tiny reassuring circles with the unbroken digits on his right hand.  
  
Holden half-retches, half-sobs. He's muttering under his breath, barely replying to Bill. "He dosed me, but... it wasn't enough. I'm resistant, she knew when she gave it to them. And he put the handcuffs on me and I thought I was a dead man... that I was finally going to die..."  
  
“Holden, come on. Go get the keys for your handcuffs. They’ll be on Bradshaw’s belt-- don’t _you_ fucking get up,” he warns Creighton. “Holden,” he says, again. The younger man stumbles off into the dark. Bill paces downhill, picks up a torch, aiming both gun and illumination at the older man in a police style two-handed grip. Holden has returned, the handcuffs free and in his outstretched palms like an offering.  
  
Bill licks his bloody lips before he speaks. “Greg, you’re going to get up nice and even for me. You’re going to walk your way slowly to that birch in front of you, you’re gonna step on behind it, and put your wrists behind you.” The trunk is only a few inches in diameter. Bill could easily kill a man around it from this point blank range.  
  
Greg knows it too, it seems. There’s no attempt to flee. He’s steady getting himself up, and pacing to the tree. Holden doesn’t need the maneuver explained, cuffing Creighton’s hands behind his back, staking him in place. The boy comes back to Bill, desperate for further instruction.

Bill allows himself to relent, to feel the torture playing on his body. He sets the torch down, holding the gun one-handed again. He spits gore from his own mouth, feeling a loose molar amidst the tugging cheek muscles. It reminds him that Holden is losing blood. A lot of blood. “You go back to the road. Down there to the squad car, and follow it up, around. You’ll come to a green Volvo. You need to-- ah, fuck--” Bill says, thinking of his very specific instructions to Em. “You’ll need to call out. There’s a girl, hiding, with the car keys. You call out and tell her who you are. Call her ‘MT’. That’s important. ‘MT’. And tell her I’m down here, and I’m okay. The police should intercept you on the route back.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“They’ll take you to hospital. A real hospital, I mean. Not Winnebago. They’ll wanna know what happened. You explain: they threatened Doctor Lizbon to make you cooperate. They drugged you, shot you. Tell them you killed Bradshaw to save my life. And then stop talking. Okay? Just zip it up.”  
  
“I can _not_ talk to the police. That is a skill I have,” Holden murmurs.

“Don’t give them the attitude you give me, okay? Jesus,” Bill blows out, half-smiling. He must be concussed. His hand goes to his breast pocket, for a cigarette. They’re with Em, in his suit jacket. And, _shit_ , so is his badge. “Go, Holden. You’re bleeding.”  
  
“Are you gonna be okay?” Holden asks softer.  
  
“Go,” Bill says, more insistently. He doesn’t breathe properly until he distantly hears the Volvo tearing off. Not even a suggestion of stealth now. He either sits, or his knees give out. He rests back on the dark slope, gun still trained on Creighton. Before him, the scene quivers like an embroidered tapestry that something is trying to get through. He blinks, again and again, relentless until the threads of red and blue flashes have woven into the black backing. Sirens. He likes that sound of sirens. Then he closes his eyes.


	13. Chapter 13

The police cars tear down the dirt road, several vehicles all splashing headlights over the inky lake below. Bill squints at the obnoxious bright, the floodlights picking him out amongst the shoreline. A megaphone blurts police orders. They’re to drop their weapons, even though there’s only one weapon in play, and he put it down the moment he heard sirens. Perhaps they didn’t believe Holden Ford, convicted child murderer, or the young caustic woman in the offensively sloganed t-shirt.  
  
Bill raises his hands high, doesn’t stand. The effort to simply keep his arms upheld feels herculean. He has bleak clarity as the lights close in on him. He must look ungodly. Beaten, dishevelled, under-dressed. Coated in the foul contents of Detective Bradshaw’s skull. “Special Agent Bill Tench,” he calls across at the approaching police force.  
  
Footfalls pound towards him, and he recognizes the civilian clothing. Quentin. “Bill? Are you--”  
  
“Not my blood.” Bill says, gesturing towards the body on the ground. “D’you have an ambulance?”  
  
“On the main road. Couldn’t fit down this dirt track-- _fuck,_ ” Ziezel says as he makes out the fallen body.  
  
_Oh, right. Quentin’s colleague._  
  
The dark haired man backs up several steps.  
  
“For me. Not him. I think he’s a little beyond medical help,” Bill says, dry and hazy.

Greg Creighton has turned about, breaking the silence he presented Bill with. “They attacked us. They killed Tony,” he’s telling an approaching officer. He’s desperate and whiny, to Bill’s ears. “Holden Ford murdered him. And this one-- this one is too dumb to see he’s being played by that criminal.”  
  
Bill glowers, speaking directly at the police closest to him. “This man is under arrest for kidnapping, and attempted murder. That should cover it for now. He hasn’t been Mirandized, but you know, he was a fucking cop, so maybe he oughta know the deal. ….well? Go on. Take him into custody.”  
  
The city police stare disbelievingly. A man and a woman. He maybe remembers the man asking a question about the Sterling Hall Bombing during the BSU talk. Bill's authority is undeniable, even sat on his ass bloody and shaking. They shift to action. Holden dropped the handcuff key by Bill’s feet, and it glints in the light beside Bill’s FBI service issue Smith and Wesson.  
  
“That’s my weapon,” he says, gesturing to the ground before him. “Holden used it to shoot Detective Bradshaw, and saved my life. There’s another gun, a couple of feet offshore in the lake. The one Ford was shot with. He managed to knock it out of Creighton’s hands when they were fighting,” Bill says, still squinting against the torches in his face. “...the Volvo?”  
  
Quentin seems to have settled himself. “Maddy’s back with the cars. Another’s taking Ford to Woodruff. There’s a medical center half an hour off--”  
  
Bill sags with relief. It’s definitely concussed stupidity, but he’d been fretting about Holden making it all the way back to Madison. Of course there’s a hospital closer. His relief is mistaken for a symptom, and Ziezel is kneeling beside him.  
  
“Hey, hey. Eyes on me, Bill. Can you stand?”

Bill nods, though he’s not sure he can. He takes Ziezel’s arm and trips his way towards the flashing lights, lashes flickering to protect his oversensitive retinas. “Quentin. The bodies are here. The missing girls. They were going to say Holden led them here.”  
  
“Yeah. You said,” Quentin says, frowning. “Come on,” he says, walking Bill up past the barrage of car-top lights and yelling voices.  
  
Bill is calm as a woman swabs some of the Bradshaw’s remains off his face and into an evidence bag. Someone takes a flash photograph, and Bill flinches back from the blisteringly bright zing.  
  
“Dammit, not now,” Ziezel tells them, steering Bill towards the dirt road.  
  
“He can’t leave the scene. We’re an officer down,” a man says, catching up to them. Bill turns and squints. A police captain, by the uniform. In fact, Bill’s confident they met at the criminal psychology lecture. He can’t for the life of him remember the man’s name, and he’s not sure he can blame that on the concussion.  
  
“You’re a _child murderer_ down,” Bill says flatly. His chest rises up, shoulders squared, immovably stern.  
  
“Special Agent Tench has to go to a hospital. Right now,” Ziezel says, unperturbed by the bluster. The unshakeable confidence of a man who has already been fired.

The captain has finally taken stock of the bloodied agent before him, cradling one of his hands, left brow split and swollen by the first cataclysmic punch. The man clears his throat uselessly, and then waves his hand in dismissal.  
  
Arm in arm with Ziezel, Bill stumbles up around the curved dirt track, finally hits the blocky shape of an ambulance, and another police vehicle. A paramedic analyzes him with chilling calm, pulls Bill down into a makeshift seat inside the vehicle’s open rear doors, triaging him. He sees her wedding ring as she gently examines his brow. The association spirals. Nancy. Brian. He had barely thought of them at all, because he couldn’t bear to. Now he has the clarity of retrospect, he can see how hideously close he came to leaving Nancy a widow, and Brian fatherless. Road school was supposed to take him _out_ of harm’s way. Guilt is interrupted when the paramedic aims her pen torch straight into his eyes.  
  
“Could you not--” Bill says, jerking away with a frown. “I know I’m concussed. Can we just go?”

She frowns, but relents. “Okay. Get him in the back. Any other injured down there?” the paramedic asks Ziezel.  
  
Bill shakes off the other paramedic’s attempts to assist him inside, but once he reaches the gurney, he lies back exhausted. He turns his head to spit a viscous clod of blood out of his mouth before he speaks. “Creighton, but he’s not bad. Bit scuffed up by Ford, that’s all.”  
  
“Okay,” Ziezel says, climbing inside.  
  
“To Woodruff,” Bill insists.  
  
“That’s the closest hospital,” Ziezel reminds him, with a hint of suspicion.  
  
“Uh huh,” Bill says, screwing his eyes closed. He feels nauseous, now. Still, nothing compared to Holden’s injuries. The kid made it. He would have heard something by now, if Holden lost too much blood in transit, went into shock, died in a police car.  
  
“You have to stay awake,” the paramedic informs him.  
  
“If I fall asleep, I’ll let you know.”  
  
Quentin has a gentle paternal tone. “Bill. Come on--”  
  
“Bill!” comes a frantic, young voice. Em is already halfway into the ambulance by the time Bill registers her as the source. She clambers inside, still wearing the immensely oversized suit jacket, trying to push closer. “Shit, is he okay?"  
  
He sits up. “I’m fine. You shouldn’t see this.”  
  
“Is that your blood? ...is that _his_ blood?”  
  
“No. Bradshaw’s. ...Greg’s under arrest, Em. We got him,” Bill says softly. “...how was Holden?”  
  
“Uhm, shaken up, bleeding all over the car we borrowed. Wanted to know if I’d seen Doctor Lizbon, which… I didn’t realize that was Kathy’s name, but we got there in the end. They drove him to-- hey, can I come with you?”  
  
“Have you given a statement?”  
  
“Sort of. I told them a bunch of stuff. Maybe they need more, but they’ll need to get a statement from you, too, right? And Holden? There are cops there. I’ll come with you. I can ride in, right?” she blathers, sitting down without ever really asking permission.  
  
Bill is handed a large square of padding. He wipes his face and neck off. The hue is wrong, the texture thicker than just blood. He tosses it aside absentmindedly and shuts his eyes again. The girl is talking to Ziezel about that camping site. Quentin informs her that her mother, Mary, has been arrested, but Em seems unfazed. More conversation that Bill ceases to really hear. A hand shakes him.  
  
“Hey. Eyes open. I’ve got your badge, by the way, Bill. And your cigarettes. I smoked a couple, I hope that’s okay. Stressful times.”  
  
“That’s fine,” he says unhappily, and scowls at the roof as if personally insulted.  
  
Em continues blithely. “I thought you were gonna try to sleep with me. When you brought round pizza and made that joke about my t-shirt. I was ready to punch you in the face and hitchhike back to New York, but you were just… being nice. Guess I’m not used to that.”  
  
Bill glances over, brow uncrumpling. Em is staring solemnly at him.  
  
“What I’m saying is, I’m glad you didn’t get shot,” Em finishes. The rest of the drive passes in warmly relieved quiet.

 

 

Woodruff does not boast a real hospital, by Bill’s definition. The town certainly isn’t big enough to warrant the huge, cubic, brutalist block he’d label a _real_ hospital. The medical center an old stone facade with large and unsightly extensions on both sides. Ziezel helps him inside, through an empty waiting room that must also serve as an emergency entrance. More shades of blue. Holden would hate this fucking place. A nurse directs them to their left, and Bill is deeply gratified to see he’s sharing the room.  
  
Holden Ford is sat upright with the angle of his hospital bed. When he spots Bill, his face transforms with relief. He’s bleary eyed, hospital gown half closed. One shoulder is free and swathed with white bandages, like a pauldron. A deep bruise is coming in on his cheek, and his neck. Bagged blood is suspended beside him, restoring the pink of his cheeks with each cubic millimeter transfused. Bill follows down the filled red tube, to the strapping of IV lines into Holden’s wrist.  
  
And then the FBI agent notices the handcuffs on both sides of the bed railing. “Are you fucking serious? Take that shit off him,” Bill growls at the closest policeman.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
Bill huffs, walking back over to Em, who anticipates him, and hands over his badge. Bill flips it open. “Take the handcuffs--”  
  
“It’s fine,” Holden reassures quickly. “You should sit down,” he adds, with the start of a smile. “You look terrible.” 

Bill frowns, but allows Ziezel to lead him towards the empty bed opposite Holden. In the hallway his paramedic lingers in close counsel with a lab coated man. Must be the doctor. The police finish a muttered exchange, and one unlocks both sets of handcuffs.  
  
“Is there a shower I can use?” Bill asks, beginning to smell the splattered body across his shirt and tie.  
  
“Sure. They’ll, uh, want your clothes. Forensics,” Ziezel says, gesturing. Under the light, the spray of maroon looks that much worse.  
  
Bill raises an eyebrow. “I’m not wearing a fucking gown.”  
  
“I’m sure I can find you scrubs or something. Bill, don’t be--” whatever Ziezel is about to say is cut off by the doctor stepping in. Ziezel sidles aside.  
  
The short, harried man checks Bill’s fingers, his brow. Out of the corner of his eye, Bill catches Holden and Em in hushed, intimate conversation. At once, there’s an uncomfortable weight in his gut. Like he’s skulled a gallon of ball bearings. They’re just talking. Holden’s too old for her, anyway. But Bill’s acutely aware that he’s not going to be so interesting to the kid now. He’s no longer Holden’s singular avenue to freedom. He blames the blow to head for that bitter thought, and tries to actually hear the information the doctor is supplying him with.

When Bill gets back from the dual x-ray of his hand, and his head, they’re still talking. His hand is broken in two places, and his trigger finger. That gets a stand-in splint, but he’ll need a cast. Probably not surgery. Much more importantly, there’s no fracture in his skull. Nancy will have one less thing to berate him for. Quentin has set out some plain blue scrubs for him, and an evidence bag. He ducks back out of the room, gets directions to the shower, and locks the door behind him with a long sigh. Silence. Finally. He watches the gore of Bradshaw slip away down his bare legs, scrubs it out of his hair, then from underneath his fingernails. He soaps up and scrubs himself down again compulsively. He doesn’t want any dead, murderous pedophile staining his skin.  
  
“You’re okay?” Quentin calls through nervously.  
  
“I’m fine,” Bill calls back, grabbing the threadbare towel. He redresses, and wanders back through the corridors in the blue scrubs, and the ill-fitting disposable bathroom slippers.  
  
Em is no longer glued to Holden’s bedside, she’s off giving a statement in the hallway. He nods at her as he hands over the brim full evidence bag to another policeman. She smiles back, and Bill feels awful for letting nonsensical resentment rise.  
  
The FBI agent steps back into the hospital room, straight to Holden’s side of the room. He drags a chair closer, collapsing into it. His headache is still buzzing, but that’s just as likely sleep deprivation. He can see slate blue dawnlight through the far window. “You awake?”

Holden’s lashes part, and he gives Bill a speculative once over. “Yeah. What did the x-rays show?”  
  
“Hand’s broken, and my finger. What about your shoulder?”  
  
“Bullet went straight through. Didn’t hit bone. They stitched it up as soon as I got here, I think that’s about the extent of my necessitated medical care. I lost a lot of blood, but,” Holden gestures up at the IV stand. The blood transfusion has been replaced by some kind of clear fluid. “I’m gonna be okay. If you hadn’t come, I would have bled out in the wilderness.”  
  
“Yeah, well, if you hadn’t tackled Creighton he’d have filled me with lead. So I guess we’re pretty much square,” Bill says, tapping out a cigarette from his package, awkward without only one and a half functioning hands. “And… if Bradshaw…” Holden’s lips twitch miserably, and Bill drops it. “Didn’t make a bad team, did we?”  
  
Holden’s mouth twists with a smile. “Sorry I called you a bastard.”  
  
Bill waves a hand. “I’ve called you worse. Have you given a statement?”  
  
“Exactly as you ordered me to, Agent,” Holden says with a brush of irony. “Can I have a cigarette?”  
  
“Who are you gonna fucking give it to, the nurse?”  
  
“I want to smoke it. ...I almost _died_ ,” Holden says, an eyebrow cocked in challenge. “I blew some guy’s head off to save you,” he adds, though the rough language is undermined by a vocal tremor.  
  
Bill puts a second cigarette between his lips, lights both, and extends one into Holden’s outstretched fingers.  
  
Holden takes a drag, nose wrinkling. “Gross,” he murmurs. He tries to hide a cough. 

Bill’s lips twitch to a grin. He leans in and lowers his voice. “You have a lawyer, right?”  
  
“Why? They’re gonna stick me in prison for shooting a child murderer?” Holden says, tone betraying that he’s already terrified at the prospect.  
  
“He kidnapped you, shot you, and you didn’t have a choice in the heat of the moment,” Bill says, frowning. “I have your back every step of the way. Madison PD are not dumb enough to press charges. I mean, a lawyer for once you’re out of the system. Get someone good, expensive, but who’ll work on commission. Or see if Lizbon will lend you enough cash to pay a retainer. Fuck, Holden, I can’t be telling you this. I’m law enforcement. But… you have a hell of a lawsuit on your hands. They framed you. The conspiracy must go deeper than just the Creightons and Bradshaw. Plenty of other people must have known your confession was coerced. And in any case, Madison PD is responsible for locking you up for a decade for a crime you didn’t commit.”  
  
Holden toys with the cigarette, fingers jittery, smoke knocked into zig-zags. “I just want them to leave me alone. If I start with a lawsuit, they’ll drag me through the mud and--”  
  
“And? You think press about you is gonna be negative? You’re eloquent, and handsome, and white. Those puppy dog eyes are gonna do wonders when housewives see you on the evening news. Talk shows are gonna eat you up whole, Holden. Madison PD will settle so fast it’ll make your head spin,” Bill insists.  
  
Holden looks distracted by the compliments.  
  
“Get a lawyer, Holden. As soon as possible. The political maneuvering and blame-shifting is already starting. Don’t waste any time. You rake these motherfuckers over the coals,” Bill says vehemently, looking around for an ashtray.  
  
“Okay, I will,” Holden murmurs, lips trembling around the barely smoked cigarette.  
  
“Talk to Lizbon. And-- hey, Al!” Bill calls, standing abruptly. The tall, African American FBI agent is scanning the room, suited up. His serious exterior cracks when he spots Bill, splitting into a smile.  
  
“Well, if it isn’t our very own G. I. Bill.”  
  
“Ha. Ha. Did you work on that one for the entire ride up?” Bill asks dryly. “Good to see you.”  
  
“Came all this way for goddamn nothing. Case is already all wrapped up, you timewasting son of a bitch.” 

“So sorry for eating into your valuable time like that,” Bill returns. “Not like you get to take off now, Al. You can still help airtight the case against these sons of bitches.”  
  
“What’s not airtight? They framed some dumb kid and now they’re gonna eat shit--” Bill smiles, and Al turns to where Holden is listening in intently. “I’m guessing that’s _this_ kid.”  
  
Holden’s friendly smile seems perfectly genuine. “That’s me, Agent.”  
  
Al's hands twitch through a mea culpa. He turns back to Bill. “I called your wife.”  
  
“You called Nancy?” Bill says, startled. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Holden’s smile drop like a removed mask.  
  
“To reassure her. Reporters have already started showing up at the scene, even if it’s the middle of fucking nowhere. Didn’t want her to hear about the standoff on the evening news. ...I think she wants to fly out.”  
  
“No. Jesus,” Bill says, pinching his nose. His headache that abated sharing a cigarette with Holden has returned. It crushes in on his skull. “I’m fine. Dammit, I should call her.”  
  
“Maybe not at four AM. I told her you were barely involved in the whole thing, and to go back to sleep.”  
  
Bill rubs circles at his temples. “Thanks.”  
  
“I guess you can tell her you slammed your hand in the car door,” Holden contributes, grin resumed. He seems taller, sprite with vitality, even in his hospital gown with IVs running into his upturned elbow. He extinguishes the cigarette, barely burned down a quarter of its length. A free man, Bill thinks, even if the official court reversal might take another couple of days. But there’s something about those transfixing blue eyes that make Bill think Holden is more dangerous than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (if any readers are interested, I've decided to stop just saving links to photos and start a tumblr to cluster together all my inspo, post updates etc. I don't know how active it will be, but it's threemissinggirls.tumblr.com)


	14. Chapter 14

Madison feels different from the moment Bill grounds himself to tarmac. It’s cooler, even in direct sunlight. No longer tingling with purgatorius dread. He pulls his suitcase with his left hand instead of the still cast-bound right, finds himself appreciating the fresh northerly wind sweeping through the town. His morning is spent in consultation with AUSA prosecuting the Creightons, advising on the case, and then giving further testimony. He looks over the crime scene photos and the forensic reports for the skeletal remains. Then Bill sits stern and suited in the back of the crowded courtroom to watch meaningless pretrial motions.   
  
The case against Creighton is solid iron. Bolted, unbreakable. Em will fly back up from New York to testify. Mary Creighton is cooperating with the prosecution to avoid an accessory charge. An at-the-time junior officer in Madison has come on record that he took a lead about a pair of men impersonating police to Detective Bradshaw, and Deputy Greg Creighton came all the way down to his desk to tell the young policeman to drop his line of inquiry. The recently retired homicide detective who went with Bradshaw to coerce Holden’s confession is due to testify too. Bill is less happy about _that_. That motherfucker should be serving hard time himself, after he was complicit in putting an innocent man away for a decade. 

He’s heard about the politically mandated inquiry occurring, but he suspects Holden’s lawsuit is where the real damage will be done to Madison PD. He doesn’t expect every dirty cop to get what’s coming. Still, there’s victories to be celebrated. The real evil, the murderous pedophile, will be contained in a prison cell for the rest of his terrible life. A guilty plea would afford Greg almost no relief except for the humiliation of a public trial. But Creighton is sticking to his story, so Bill supposes he’ll just have to come back to Madison in a few months to watch the man receive multiple life sentences.

The reinstate Detective Ziezel didn’t have the time to come to court for the pretrial motions, but he meets Bill afterwards for a run through. Max’s Deli, of course. Kathy Lizbon is there too, dressed professionally, between the psychiatric appointments at her in-town clinic. It’s a very late lunch, and Bill is too tired to make good conversation. The good food is familiar, but the meeting is freshly directionless. There’s no all-encompassing discussion of Holden’s innocence to fill every abated pause.

“So. How’s Holden doing?” Bill finally allows himself to ask, as he’s finishing the sandwich.  
  
Kathy, as she’s finally asked him to call her, frowns at the casual wording. “Adjusting. You haven’t seen him yet?”  
  
_What excuse would I have to see him? He didn’t even show up to the pretrial._ “No. I should probably call in.”  
  
She nods, away in her purse, then copying out Holden’s new phone number and address. She tears out the notepad’s page and presses it into Bill’s hands. “You should,” she says, very seriously.

Bill lines up the address on his motel room bedside table, beside his badge and gun. If he’s honest with himself, the urge to check up on the kid is what dragged him back to Wisconsin in the middle of another ongoing case. It would be pathetic to come all this way, and not even stop by. The unfinished business has been hanging about him as thick as inner city, dog-days smog.

 

 

The past two weeks in Virginia have been a fuzzy languor of normalcy. He never explained the entirety of the perilous standoff to Nancy. He’d waved off his broken hand as a minor injury endured when apprehending a suspect. As if the torchlight shootout had been an embarrassing curbside scuffle. Bill complains about not being able to play golf, and his wife treats it as just desserts for being reckless. Likewise, the response at Quantico had been unexpectedly understated. His anticipation had been split between receiving congratulations for the heroic capture of child murderers, and being berated for his unprofessional involvement in the case. Instead, Bill was engulfed by the impersonal, monochrome avalanche of paperwork. Even getting his gun back from Madison PD had taken about five pain-in-the-ass forms, faxed over one at a time.   
  
When Shepard eventually called Bill in, he barely skated over the case in Madison, preoccupied with his real goal: reassigning Special Agent Bill Tench to more pressing matters. The still-injured FBI agent was to head another murder investigation that the Bureau had been implicated into by some high ranking politician Bill had never heard of. The case had none of the personal fascination, but still kept Bill relentlessly occupied. He’d heard from Nancy that Holden had been interviewed on the CBS evening news, but he missed the segment. Nancy described Holden as a ‘poor thing’. That stirred some voluminous and undiagnosable emotion in Bill.

 

 

At their late lunch, Lizbon had mentioned that Holden’s lawsuit against Madison PD was forging ahead, and that Holden was out of hospital. Bill hasn’t spoken to him since they were together in Woodruff, before Bill was whisked back across the invisible glass that separates civilian from FBI. He’d almost called Lizbon, to ask after the kid. Phone to his ear, found himself listening to a dial tone, armed with no justification for the call. But now, Bill is in Madison. Doctor Lizbon _told_ him to call in on Holden. The sun is setting as he leaves his motel room, and drives down pleasant and peaceful urban streets. He finds a small apartment block, elegantly constructed and prewar, nothing like blocky highrises downtown. There’s barely a dozen mailboxes by the entrance. He wonders what Holden is paying in rent. Lizbon’s helping for now, no doubt. Holden’s place is on just the second storey, and there’s no bell or buzzer beside his door, so Bill just knocks. Before he has a chance to second-guess, wonder if Holden is out enjoying his freedom, the door is eased a few inches inward. Holden peers out.  
  
“Hello,” Holden greets cautiously. 

“...thought I’d see you at the pretrial,” Bill says instead of a real greeting.  
  
Holden nods. “I didn’t…. want ....to go,” he finishes, grimacing and looking over Bill’s shoulder into the corridor. Bill catches the sloppiness at once. Holden’s intoxicated. He tries not to let his disapproval show. Holden’s just finished a decade in prison. Deserves to cut loose.  
  
“Mary says she didn’t know. She’s talking. Trial’s gonna be fish in a barrel. Maybe something smaller than a barrel. Fish in a bucket. Fish in a fucking coffee mug.”  
  
“Okay,” Holden says unemotively. He opens the door expectantly, gestures Bill inside.  
  
The apartment is smaller than Bill expected, and looks more like an open house than a young man’s living room. Bill scans the scant room uneasily. “Have you thought about making it look less like…” Bill trails off, grinding his teeth with regret _. A prison cell? Jesus, Bill, you can’t say that._  
  
“I only moved in a week ago,” Holden says defensively.

“Right,” Bill mutters. He scratches the back of his neck. “So, how’s your evening going?”  
  
Holden shrugs, non communicative. Bill evaluates the surrounding evidence for a complete answer. An open champagne bottle, beside what is certainly a water glass. No TV on, not even an open book. A complete dearth of stimulation.  
  
“Kathy bought that for me. I don’t normally drink… I think,” Holden says, rubbing his eyes.  
  
“I’m getting dinner.”  
  
“Here?”  
  
“No. Out. I was inviting you,” Bill says, squinting.  
  
Holden barely registers the invitation. “I visited Daniels.”  
  
“Your friend from Dodge?”  
  
Holden nods. “I went back to Winnebago, with Kathy, to say-- I don’t know. He kept talking about how-- how good I had it. What I’d be able to do on the outside,” he says. “Kathy, I mean, Doctor Lizbon, she told me to only have one glass of alcohol. It interacts with the Largactil.” 

Bill steps over and swishes the remaining liquid. Maybe half a glass of champagne left. “Do you usually treat medical advice so discretionarily?”  
  
“Usually?” Holden laughs acerbically. “Usually I don’t get to decide what treatments come my way, Bill.”  
  
“Well, you’re going to have to start exercising some judgment, Holden. I’d say a good start would be--”  
  
“What would you do now?”  
  
Bill sets down the bottle, trying his best to unpick the snarled up question. “What do you mean _?_ Tonight?”  
  
“What am I supposed to do with Holden Ford?”  
  
“ _Jesus_ , Holden, I’m not going to tell you how to live your whole life.”  
  
“No?” Holden asks, sounding disappointed. He stumbles his way towards the couch and lolls backwards.  
  
Bill folds his arms. “You’re not sick of people telling you what you can and can’t do?”  
  
“You can be sick of something and not see any alternatives, right? Isn’t that all of politics?”  
  
“A bottle of champagne down you, and you’re Winston fucking Churchill,” Bill says under his breath. “No, Holden. There are plenty of alternatives. I mean, Christ, you’re gonna have enough money to do whatever you want once Madison PD settles your lawsuit. Go back to school. Write a fucking book. Open up shop as a PI and bust out the corkboards. I mean-- I mean, _you_ get to choose what Holden Ford becomes.”  
  
Holden rolls his eyes, pours out what’s left of the wine into the water glass.

“...I should go,” Bill says, scowling.  
  
“Okay,” Holden mutters behind him.  
  
Bill turns for the door, and then continues turning, the full 360 degrees, right back to Holden. “Alright, you’re not drinking that,” he says abruptly, two strides to take the glass out of Holden’s hands. He takes off to the kitchen, pours it down the sink. “You need to drink some water and go to bed,” he says, refilling the glass from the tap.  
  
“Why are you back in town, anyway?” Holden asks. Not even protesting the confiscated champagne.  
  
“I was testifying about my conversation with Mary Creighton. Assisting the prosecutor.”  
  
“Right,” Holden mumbles. He’s slumped back in the seat, but there’s an expectant energy as he stares up.  
  
Bill hits the anticipation with his own bewilderment. What does Holden want from him? He sets down the water, and then backtracks to a seat. He casts about for conversation. “What was Daniels in prison for?” 

“Jethro Daniels shot his own brother whilst in a delusion state. That’s what I heard. I didn’t ask him about it.”  
  
“He shot his own brother?”  
  
“Yes. I think he committed other violent crimes too, but that’s what people knew him for. I guess he was kind of a pariah too. He’s one of the, oh, four people who I would count as a friend. It’s hard to make friends when everyone thinks you killed four little girls,” Holden murmurs. The buzzing tension has abated. Holden drinks the water, maybe just because Bill made it sound like an order.  
  
“He believed you?”  
  
Holden shrugs. “He believes me now.”  
  
Bill frowns. Being considered a violent pedophile is the antithesis of friendship, as far as he’s concerned. “Am I one the four?”  
  
“Little girls?” Holden asks, deliberately stupid.  
  
“Friends, Holden.”  
  
“What do you think, _Bill_?”  
  
“Well, there’s Lizbon. Daniels. …who’m I missing?”  
  
“Em. We talk almost every day.”  
  
Bill is in knots at once. _Too fucking young for you._ “Em. Right. So that makes three.”  
  
“Does it?” Holden says, miming counting on his fingers. “You might be right, Agent.”

He’s deliberately stoking Bill’s temper, and the FBI agent has no idea why. He doesn’t know why he can’t leave, either. “Which teeth did he lose?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Daniels.”  
  
“Oh. Central and lateral incisors in the top row,” Holden murmurs. “Are you considering trying to win my friendship, Bill? I think you look much more professional with teeth.”  
  
“I imagine you were being this fucking irritating, in the direction of someone less collected than me, and he saved your stupid ass.”  
  
“A man said he was going to cut my penis off, and then choke me to death on it. I was just trying to have a shower. Daniels got in the way,” Holden is turning the empty glass, round, round, faster every moment. His tone stays clipped and practical despite the ever present slurring.  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“He didn’t even touch me in the end. The other inmate, I mean. There was a brawl and the guards poured on in.” The glass is a rotor in Holden’s unsteady fingers. “Just some fresh arrival who heard laying down a beating on the Madison Child Murderer was a victimless way of proving yourself to all of Dodge Correctional. ...I don’t think I like alcohol. It’s like the tranquilizers. I feel all faded.” 

“Holden,” Bill murmurs. He almost rises to comfort the boy before him. He’d take the spinning glass away, put his arms around this withered husk. He can’t imagine Holden would want to be touched right now.  
  
“They were right, weren’t they? You can do anything to a child murderer. It’s a free pass for any nasty, niggling little urges. The devils that knock around the attic of your mind when you try to sleep,” Holden says, tripping up now. “You let ‘em all out. It’s a child murderer, it doesn’t count as a human. ...you can shoot them in the head from point blank without giving them any chance to surrender.”  
  
“You gave Bradshaw a chance to surrender.”  
  
Holden’s laugh is hollow all the way down. “That’s what you told the cops, is it?”  
  
“It’s what happened,” Bill insists. “And you’d do best to start remembering it that way, too. ...Holden, I’m sorry that your time on the inside was so hard--”  
  
Holden sets down the empty glass hard, immediately enraged by Bill’s platitudes. “Don’t you fucking start with-- I'm sorry. I--I should go to sleep.”  
  
“Yeah, you should.” Bill says regretfully, stands. “... I really am sorry those things happened to you, Holden.”  
  
“Weren’t you _listening_ ? They didn’t happen to me. They happened to a child murderer.”  
  
Bill is arrested by the strange logic. He squats to try to meet the boy’s eyes. “No, they didn’t. They happened to an innocent kid.” 

Holden’s fingers jerk back from the glass he’d been clutching at. It overturns out of his rigid, clawed fist. The ringing collision is hammer-loud in the little apartment, even though the thick glass doesn’t break. Holden and Bill watch it roll, slip off the table, onto the carpet. Finally still. Bill reaches down, and leans in to set it back in place. His hand is tantalizingly near to Holden’s.   
  
From so close, he can see the clumping lashes and the scarred forearm and a thousand other minute, damaged details that compose Holden Ford. The young man shudders, crumpling inwards as if empty. A time-lapse of fruit rotting from the inside out.   
  
Bill takes Holden’s hand, squeezing the fingers roughly, as if that will undo the intimacy of contact. “Hey. Kid. It’s okay.”  
  
“No, it’s not,” Holden whispers.  
  
“You’re right, but, _you’re_ going to be okay. You’re one tough son of a bitch. You know how much that pissed me off? Interviewing someone I couldn’t hope to crack?” Bill murmurs. Holden chokes a sob down his undulating throat, face screwed up to hide emotion.   
  
_Of course you want to talk to Em_ , Bill thinks. _She’s come out of this so strong._ The FBI agent hisses between his teeth in indecision, pushing up out of his stoop to sit beside Holden. At first, he just sits beside the crying boy. He’s not good at this shit with his own family. He puts his arm about Holden’s shoulders in a sideways hug. He expected reluctance, but Holden huddles in immediately, face tucked against Bill’s shoulder. He’s drawing down shuddering, horrified breaths against the suit lapel.  
  
“I know you’re gonna be okay,” Bill whispers, patting Holden’s back.

 

 

There’s equilibrium achieved by their peaceful positioning. Holden’s breathing evens down into settling drags of oxygen. There’s only the occasional catch and shudders of pain to reveal the outpouring Bill just witnessed. The older man bears more and more weight until he decides the kid is actually falling asleep on him.  
  
“Come on. Bed.”  
  
Holden hums discontentedly, but goes along with Bill steering him towards the short corridor. Too small an apartment to not find the bedroom with one guess.  
  
“D’you want to try to throw up?” Bill asks, concerned.  
  
Holden shakes his head, shrugging off the creased button-down shirt. Holden’s bedroom is sparse too, mostly occupied by a spacious, neatly made bed. There’s a crammed bedside table, finally something other than furniture. Bill glances towards the sprawled papers, and Holden’s face sours. He clamps a hand around the stacked files, tossing them under the bed, like a teenager hiding pornography. Bill identifies them in the brief glimpse. University prospectuses. He thinks he saw the NYU logo. Must be overwhelming, and Holden doesn’t like to admit to anyone that he is overwhelmed.

Holden is falling into his bed, but Bill’s attention is captured by the other almost-decor Holden has adorned his living environment with. On the other side of the bedside table, beneath a minimalistic lamp, is an ashtray. Pristine as expensive hotel porcelain. Not a scuff mark, ash pile, or tobacco stain in sight. Resting precisely centered is a clean, partially burned cigarette. Bill knows it’s the very same one that Holden barely smoked at Woodruff. He wonders what the undesired tobacco and the crumbled ash signifies to Holden. Survival? Triumph? Freedom? He doesn’t ask, as the boy curls up under the duvet.   
  
Holden doesn’t seem to know what to do with all the bedding, or all the space in the commodious mattress. He doesn't appear to pay heed to the injured shoulder that must be bandaged up beneath his t-shirt. Whether that's a high pain tolerance or alcohol numbness, Bill isn't sure. Holden settles face-down, prone with his mixed-psychoactive-chemical-stupor, or perhaps just emotional exhaustion.   
  
Bill cannot leave this man alone, crushed under his existential despair. “Creighton isn’t talking,” he says, his weight dipping into the foot of Holden’s bed. He feels like a mother sat bedside to a frightened child.  
  
“I heard,” Holden mumbles groggily into the white cumulous of pillow.  
  
“Which means no directions to their other victims.”  
  
And the blue eyes are alert upon him. “You think there are more bodies?”  
  
“I do. You were right about not going cold turkey, Holden. But they were never going to be at Squirrel Lake. Say, someone finds a body at the campsite. Police start excavating the area, find the missing girls, and more victims put in the ground after you started serving your sentence--”  
  
“I would have been instantly exonerated, and the murder investigation would have started afresh,” Holden murmurs, propping himself up on an elbow. _Some kind of fucking intellect to put that together while absolutely plastered_ , Bill thinks.  
  
“Yeah. I think they’d have been more careful than that.”  
  
“I think so too,” Holden agrees, hand on his chin, one slender finger tapping his cheekbone in thought. “I’d imagine you’ve started compiling a list of missing children fitting the victim profile within a certain radius of Madison.”  
  
“That doesn’t take very much imagination.”  
  
“Can I see your investigation files?”  
  
“And who the fuck are you, Holden Ford? Some kind of expert consultant?” Bill asks smiling, eyebrow raised. “If I were to accidentally leave them on a coffee table here, I guess nobody could stop you calling me with some thoughts on the matter. You’re a free man, after all.”  
  
“Are you going to interview him? I should come.”  
  
“Pardon me?”  
  
“They brought in Jessica’s mom to try to rattle me. You could bring in the man Greg framed.”  
  
“No. Of course not,” Bill says with a lengthy, stuttering eye roll. Ford is drunk and stupid, after all. “Go to sleep, Holden.”  
  
“I’m sorry about this evening. Come over tomorrow and we can talk about the case.”  
  
“ _My_ case. And I fly out at midday.”  
  
“Then come over in the morning,” Holden insists, needy.  
  
“Go to sleep.”  
  
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Holden says. He smiles. The wet lashes glue closed.   
  
Bill lets himself out, shaking his head in disbelief. But he returns to the apartment, and on his knees, in tense silence, he slots several of the photocopied pages beneath the door to Holden’s apartment.


	15. Chapter 15

Bill sleeps poorly. He may have fumbled his way towards Holden’s trauma, but he’s touched it now, or maybe been touched by it. He feels marked, anointed by the tears shed into his shoulder. And the weight of Holden’s shuddering body, wheezing with unbearable memory.

Bill cannot withdraw from the barbed imaginings that ensnare him. The disturbing medical photos become more vivid in his mind as he rolls over, and over, on the uncomfortable motel bed. As with all knowing, there is no retreat. There is only one direction with knowledge, and that is deeper into the tangled mess. Forward.

 

 

His morning starts with a blow out with Nancy about being in Madison when Brian’s school play was on, a play that Bill can’t remember ever being informed about. He didn’t want to see ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ performed by a bunch of gradeschoolers, anyway. Brian didn’t even have a speaking role. Inside a fucking camel costume. Yet, apparently, his father’s absence was an unmitigated travesty. The argument doesn’t end, but Nancy has to leave to drop Brian at school. Bill checks out of the motel livid. He scowls into his morning coffee, replaying the argument as if studying a taped confession for new angles. He could have been more apologetic. More enthusiastic about his son overcoming the normally crippling stage fright. But, _shit_ , Nance should know him by now. He wasn’t being cruel, he was being honest. Guilt swarms in till he can’t stomach his sausages and eggs. Bill tries to leave the argument in the mediocre diner with his fully-paid bill and half-eaten breakfast.

He brings Holden takeout hotcakes and a dossier of missing persons reports. He knows which offering Holden is going to actually want, but Holden could gain a little weight by Bill’s estimation. Not to mention, the boy is healing from a very serious injury. Still, Bill feels overexposed by the sentimental purchase as he scales the rounded staircase up to Holden’s apartment.

He’s expecting a wincing, hungover mess. The young man that answers the door is bright-eyed, vibrating with anticipation.

“Bill. Come in.”

“You’re chipper, considering,” Bill mutters. He steps past Holden, looks around the apartment. The champagne bottle is gone. His papers are neatly laid out on the coffee table. Beside them Holden has set a black coffee (half finished), and a book entitled ‘Psychopathy: Theory and Research’. There’s a new picture hung up on the wall -- an glinting, unfamiliar cityscape, printed cheaply. Bill’s sure this is an active efforts to make the apartment appear lived in, but the set dressing has him more unsettled. “I didn’t say I was going to come.”  
  
“I’d like to, again, apologize for my conduct yesterday. I wasn’t myself, and--”  
  
“Yeah you were. Holden, quit it, okay?” Bill says, frowning.  
  
“Quit what?”  
  
“This--” he can’t put his finger on what is annoying him, so he extends the plastic bag towards Holden’s injured arm. “You should eat something.”  
  
“Thank you. You didn’t need to do that.” Holden takes it, but with his left hand. Already, Bill notices him moving more gingerly. Dammit. Probably slept all fucked up on the bullet wound.

Bill shrugs off the gratitude and gestures towards the table. “What’s the book?”  
  
“Oh. It's by Robert Hare. Doctor Carr recommended it to me. It’s very insightful. I was talking to her about the prosecution’s psychological profile-- she was assisting, too.”  
  
“You saw Wendy?”  
  
“I saw her when she was in town giving a statement. She and Kathy, and I, went to lunch.”  
  
It rubs Bill the wrong way, three civilians sitting about theorizing about an open case. Especially seeing as Wendy hasn’t called _him_ about it. “And how did that go?”  
  
“Oh, great. I don’t think she likes me very much, but she is absolutely fascinating to listen to. She was telling me all about pairs of murderers-- the Moors Murders, Starkweather and Fugate-- but we were talking about the idea of platonic partners becoming killers. Less examples of that in criminal history. She thinks Creighton and Bradshaw may have bonded while serving together. Overseas and in wartime, they would have faced very little threat of criminal prosecution for violent acts. Then in ‘64 Bradshaw moved here from Ohio, and Creighton set him up with a job. Perhaps they’d already planned their crimes, way back then. At the very least, they’d both established a kinship in their sexual proclivities and sadistic tastes. I mean, My Lai might have made the news in a big way, but Korea had its fair share of atrocities too. Plenty of war crimes committed by armed forces have gone unpunished…” Holden trails off at Bill’s black expression. “...you served,” he surmises.

“Yeah, I did,” Bill replies flatly.  
  
“I wasn’t trying to imply that…”  
  
“That the armed forces that protect this country are a breeding ground for psychopathy?”  
  
“No,” Holden says between nervously clenched teeth.  
  
“What were you trying to imply, Holden?” Bill asks, offering the unconvincing veneer of a smile.  
  
“That their sexual thrills were not situationally specific. We can start to look at less specific crimes, even if we keep the same victim profile.”  
  
“Fascinating. And you got that all from your lunch with Wendy, did you?”  
  
“Why are you angry? We want to help you.”  
  
“This is not a fucking hobby for me, Holden.”  
  
“I understand that,” Holden pacifies. “And I’d like to help you do your job. I have some thoughts on the missing persons you left me.”  
  
_As if he’s some kind of fucking professional consultant._ Bill sits down on the far end of the couch, cognizantly unclenching his fists. “Okay. Dazzle me.”

Holden sits too, straightening the already impeccable papers. “Well. I think you can start by eliminating any missing children who have begun to undergo puberty. There’s a couple of eleven year olds in the file you gave me. One girl was fourteen years of age.”  
  
“She looked very fucking similar.”  
  
“Creighton started with these murders _because_ Em was getting too old for his very specific fantasy. He’s not going to be gratified by someone older than she was when he lost interest. That’s stupi--unlikely.”  
  
“What about Bradshaw’s tastes?” Bill returns acidly. Remind Holden that he failed to anticipate the biggest revelation of the case-- the crimes weren’t committed by the single man the boy had repeatedly described.  
  
“He seemed deferential when I was kidnapped. Greg was older. Superior rank in the army, and in the police force. I don’t think Bradshaw was picking the victims, I think he was simply along for the ride.”  
  
“Awful lot of extrapolation from your few of hours of observation. Especially seeing as there didn’t seem to be a sexual motivation to kidnapping and murdering you. That I saw, anyway.”  
  
Holden stops picking through the plastic bag, though his fingers keep twitching at the plastic. His eyes stay down. “There wasn’t. They thought I’d remembered my confession, and that’s how you’d found out about the coercion and the planted details. So they had to kill me. I heard them talking about it.”  
  
“So, a different dynamic to when they murdered children.” 

Holden’s eyes are still down, but Bill can see the pearly knuckles of Holden’s deathgrip of the styrofoam take out container. The young man’s tone still seems solicitous. “You wanted my opinions, Bill. You knew you needed my help.”  
  
“Maybe I was trying to comfort you, have you thought of that?”  
  
And Holden’s mask splits apart. “Bull _shit_ . You couldn’t crack this case alone, any more than you could have cracked the last three missing girls without me pleading my way towards the truth.”  
  
Bill’s eyebrows raise. His tone dribbles and drips condescension. “And how, exactly, did you contribute? _I_ figured out it was Creighton. _I_ figured out the connection between him and Mary. Shit, Wendy figured out the caramel corn--”  
  
“I already knew about _that_ .”  
  
“Oh. I guess it slipped your mind.”  
  
“No. It just-- it just didn’t help my cause. That detail made me look more guilty. Added layers of conspiracy that I wasn’t sure you were ready to buy into.”  
  
A fire already smouldered in Bill’s chest, but Holden’s words are splashed petroleum. This man was playing him every fucking _second_ of those interviews. “Tell me, when you got all blubbery, when I said I believed you, was that acting? I gotta say, I bought the ugly crying. You could move to LA with those skills, if you’re still taking advice on Holden Ford’s future.”

“Oh, fuck you. I was drugged up. When I wasn’t tranquilized, I was handholding you through your fucking investigation. I was right about his relationship with Em, about him being a cop. You’re not the only person who can solve cases, Bill. You’re not some supreme harbinger of justice. You didn’t keep coming back to Winnebago because you _cared_ about finding those girls.”  
  
“Why did I come back, then?” Bill asks dangerously.  
  
“You liked seeing me crushed to new depths of vulnerability?”  
  
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Bill asks, on his feet, towering over Holden.  
  
“I’m supposed to act like I don’t recognize the way you look at me? I will say, most of the men I’ve seen wearing that look, they don’t beat around the bush so bad. The first flicker of helplessness, and I’m pinned to the nearest wall--” Holden chokes the sentence off. His face contorts with dismay at himself. He stands, ghostly pale, wringing his hands.

Bill forcefully stops the creep of splinted fingers towards his holster. He turns, and lets himself out of the apartment. He makes it down a few steps before the door crashes open behind him. Holden sounds asthmatic with desperation.  
  
“Bill. Bill, I didn’t mean that. Wait. _Wait._ ”  
  
He doesn’t respond. He flies down the staircase, abandoning the pleas behind him. His march doesn’t slow when he reaches the parking lot, but he can hear Ford keeping pace. _Don’t kill him. Don’t kill him_ , even though in this moment he’s saturated with the temptation he’s heard criminals describe so vividly. _Wring that faggot’s neck for comparing you to a prison rapist._ _No, no._ _Get in your car._ Bill opens the door, tuning out Ford’s grovelling, refusing to look at him in the rear view. Then, the passenger side door opens. Holden Ford has let himself into the hire car.

The audacity shocks him wordless, but only for a beat. “Get the fuck out,” Bill spits into the younger man’s contorted face.  
  
Holden is a churning flood of regret. He slides across the seat, closer, closer. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t saying you were-- I liked that you came to visit me,” Holden implores, squeaky, barely audible. His eyes are unnaturally wide. “Come back up. Please. Let me apologize. Let me make it up to--” his hand reaches for Bill’s sleeve, and Bill jerks out of reach.  
  
“You touch me, Ford, and that’s assault of a federal goddamn officer. A Class D felony. You’re looking at four years in federal.”  
  
A different sort of horror unveils itself across Holden’s stricken face. His mouth snaps closed like a bear trap, and his hands lurch back to bury hidden in his lap. Bill’s wrath becomes satisfaction.  
  
“While I’m renting this car, it is the _vehicle_ of a federal officer. If you continue to trespass, I will place you under arrest. Am I making myself clear?”  
  
Holden looks straight past Bill. His eyes are open, but closed. “Yes.”  
  
“Yes, what?”  
  
The young man gapes at the air. “Yes, sir.”  
  
Bill turns the key in the ignition. He doesn’t look over as he speaks. “Get out of my fucking sight.”

 

 

Bill drives straight to the airport, every muscle cramped up with unexerted wrath. He chainsmokes in the hire car, counting down the minutes until he returns the Plymouth Valiant and boards his flight back to Virginia. The incident with Ford is a blinding, deafening explosion before him that he refuses to look at. He doesn’t need this in his brain. Won’t do him any good. He shuts Holden Ford away in a box in his mind. An airtight cell of a box, for the manipulative little prick to rot in. 

He thinks he scared Ford out of contacting him again, but Bill will call Wendy, Lizbon, Em, make sure that the containment is permanent. Make sure that he doesn’t get any apologetic phonecalls at work numbers, or at home. He never wants to hear from Holden Ford again. He knows, rationally, that he’s somewhat responsible for the transgressed boundaries. Gave Ford the wrong idea when he acted like a decent person, and comforted him. But he doesn’t want to be rational. He _wants_ to be angry. He puts out his cigarette, collects his luggage from the car boot, and wipes Madison permanently off his mental map of America.


	16. Chapter 16

Nancy must be able to tell something is seriously wrong, because she doesn’t bring up the school play when Bill trudges through the front door. He kisses her on the cheek and goes straight to bed, even though it’s barely past four. He was supposed to go to Quantico. He’ll figure out some excuse when he shows up tomorrow. He lies in the dark room, staring at the roof, tumultuous with regret and with anger.  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“I barely slept last night.”  
  
“Bill. Don’t you want dinner, or--”  
  
“Come here,” Bill requests desperately.  
  
Nancy comes to the bed, kneeling on the quilted sheet, then lying down beside him. The warmth of his wife's body is the first thing he’s actually felt since the incident with Ford.

Bill wraps an arm around her and draws her in close to his chest, kissing curls that tickle his chin. “Why do you think I work for the FBI?”  
  
“Because you want to help people. Bill, what happened?”  
  
“I-- I trusted the wrong person in my investigation.”  
  
“Are you… in trouble?”  
  
Bill shakes his head, considers. “No. I don’t think so. But I know that my judgment was off. And I don’t know how to fix that problem. That goes deeper.”  
  
Nancy kisses his cheek. “Everyone makes mistakes.”  
  
He thinks of Ford’s insistence that he come over this morning, how he just bent to the demands placed on him by an almost-stranger. Those papers are still at his apartment. The son of a bitch. “This was a _big_ mistake,” he mumbles, shutting his eyes.

 

 

He tries to keep Holden Ford confined and compartmentalized, and returns to Quantico set upon work. That’s the best tonic, in his experience. An occupied mind. He could be more pleasantly occupied. He’s not making much headway with his other case, the string of beatings in Sacramento. He flies out to California that the week to examine a crime scene, and interview to a survivor of one of the attacks. His research on Creighton is stacked into a box and left in storage in the BSU’s paltry office space. He doesn’t like abandoning a case, but he’s certain this one will be solved with or without him. Every local cop is going to want a chance to put an unsolved murder out of the red, into the black. There will be teams of law enforcement in Wisconsin and in surrounding states, going over the same missing persons and unsolved murders that he was, trying to find evidentiary links to Creighton and Bradshaw. The case doesn’t need him. It certainly doesn’t need some civilian investigator.

 

 

A month passes without the breakthroughs Bill hoped would spawn in his absence. The Creighton trial is delayed by the tainted jury pool. Bill keeps updated, with calls from Ziezel, and from a Detective named Foster who has taken the helm of the investigation into the Madison Child Murderers’ crimes. Foster seems smart, but susceptible to hierarchical pressure. Madison PD seem to be working on the theory that the four murders were the sum total of all crimes committed, with Bill repeatedly stresses as unlikely. Foster lets slip that the Ford lawsuit was settled, too quick for the precinct’s liking, presumably to preempt a mayoral bi-election. That explains most of the reluctance to begin inducting new victims into Creighton and Bradshaw’s body count: families of the deceased may become litigious in response to perceived mishandling. Bill tries to find inroads with Milwaukee PD instead, but they don’t much care for federal involvement either. The boxes that Bill has built keep him out, too.

 

 

He thinks about Holden Ford nearly every day, stabs of familiarity that gush hotly until he can smother them closed. Guilt. Betrayal. Concern. He plugs each seeping mental fissure as they appear. His cigarettes remind him of Holden. He wrestles that association under control. A conversation with Wendy Carr. A brief phone call with Em. Another person who’d seen lecherous motives in his attempts to help. He tries not to think about that. A young detective working in Sacramento with a similar dumb Mormon haircut. Planes, cop cars, guns. Prisons. Interview rooms. Every day, Bill bleeds Holden Ford. 

 

 

He’s listening to a recording that a detective in Oregon insisted he give his thoughts on, during road school. A stock standard confession that was later established to be entirely untrue. The suspect’s uneducated drawl, and the interrogator’s inelegant technique has him drowsy. He catches a light flickering on the desk before him, and realizes the muted phone ring isn’t background noise to the taped confession. He pulls off the padded earphones and pauses the tape.  
  
“Special Agent Bill Tench.”  
  
“...sorry to bother you at work. I got this number off your business card.”  
  
It takes him a second to place the unusually soft voice. “Em? Are you okay?”  
  
“I’m fine. Holden’s not. He’s been arrested for trespassing and assault. In Madison.”

It rings too familiar. Isn’t that the exact crimes he threatened to arrest Ford for? He puts it out of his mind and resists the tug of responsibility. “I see.”  
  
“I can’t make the bail. And the money from his lawsuit hasn’t come through yet.”  
  
“Call Lizbon. Or Ziezel.”  
  
“Bill, Holden and Kathy had a falling out. Weeks ago. A really bad one. They aren’t on speaking terms, let alone bail money terms.”  
  
Bill wonders if Holden crossed one friend off his meagre list, and started dispatching the rest too. But here’s Em, friend number three, still looking out for his sorry ass. She's _still_ defending him.  
  
“Besides, it’s all trumped up charges against him, retribution for the settlement Madison PD have to pay out. _You_ could sort that out. You’re FBI.”  
  
“Ford and I aren’t on speaking terms either. This is really nothing to do with me. He’s an adult, and responsible for himself.”  
  
“C'mon. He saved your fucking life, Bill. He’s gonna go to prison, or do god knows what to himself to avoid going back there, and you won’t even make a fucking phone call? You asshole.”  
  
“Watch your tone, young lady.”  
  
The line clicks closed abruptly. Bill holds the phone several seconds longer, and then hangs up. He can still see Bradshaw rearing up over him with his first raised, the way his face exploded and flapped wet strips of gore. Holden standing over, holding _his_ gun. He raps his knuckles on the desk in indecision and then dials out to Detective Foster.

 

 

The policeman answers, and Bill feels budding resentment become a hideous, flowery infestation.  
  
“Bill Tench here. I’m to understand you arrested Ford?” he asks, upfront, brusquely.  
  
“...well, that reached you fast,” says Foster disparagingly. “Yes. We did. He broke into the home of Clementine Bradshaw, and assaulted her.”  
  
“Assaulted her? Wait, another Bradshaw?”  
  
“Yes. Tony Bradshaw’s widow. Ford went over to the home of the man he shot dead, and assaulted his widow.”  
  
“What sort of assault?”  
  
“He pushed her into a wall, threatened to beat her if she didn’t answer his questions.”  
  
Bill disbelieves at once. “I imagine that’s all coming from her. Accusations about her _husband’s killer_ . ...what does Ford say happened?”  
  
“What does it matter what he says? The man is crazy, and as far as I can tell, a pathological liar. This isn’t the first time we’ve caught him poking his nose into an open investigation he has no authority to be involved in.”  
  
_Goddammit, Holden._ Bill tries to stifle the spasm of protectiveness. He cannot care about Holden Ford. “Okay. Let me come sort this out--”  
  
“There’s nothing to sort out.”  
  
“You don’t want to put a man who has already served ten innocent years back in prison, do you? So, the kid thinks he’s fucking Tintin, and he’s bothering witnesses, messing up your investigation. He just spent a decade trying to solve a crime. His entire life was devoted to an amateur investigation, and that kind of dedication takes time to fade.”

“He assaulted--”  
  
“Is she badly hurt?”  
  
“...no.”  
  
“Is she hurt at _all_ ? Did she even pay a visit to hospital? It’s just her word he hurt her, right? And she has plenty of reason to hate his guts.”  
  
There’s silence. “I can’t have some kid jeopardizing evidence and screwing around with witnesses, Bill. This is an active case. The FBI wouldn’t stand for it either.”  
  
“I will make sure Holden Ford knows to back on out of this investigation. You have my word. And if he doesn’t cooperate after that, nobody’s gonna raise a finger to stop you throwing him in jail.”  
  
"I can't make these decisions, Bill. Unless you want to fly out and argue this to my boss, there's nothing you can do."

 

 

His next call is to United Airlines. He finds a flight to take him as far as Milwaukee, but it flies out of Washington National Airport in barely over an hour. He was supposed to be in an important meeting this entire afternoon. He deliberates a few agonized seconds, keeping the airline receptionist waiting, and then books a seat. He cancels the meeting on the unsolved murders in California, jogs down the pleasant swathes of Quantico lawn to his car, and tears off towards the interstate.

 

 

He pays too much for an unscheduled car hire, trying to beat the setting sun down the rush hour highway to the Madison Police Station. The light fades from azure to pitch black in the narrow window behind the police captain’s desk. Bill pays more attention to the sky than the argument himself. It's the same points that were raised in a twenty second phone call. Ford is an unmedicated, pathological nuisance who is going to contaminate a criminal investigation. He's also, pretty obviously in Bill's opinion, not guilty of trespass or assault. They don’t have any reason to keep Holden but spite, he doesn’t have any reason to free Holden but affection. His presence as a federal agent, his unassailable insistence, should be enough. And sixty minutes of dull back and forth later, it is. The FBI agent is lead through the desks of stony, uniformed police, back into the walled off concrete of the precinct’s jail.

Holden Ford is hunched almost double in the otherwise empty jail cell. Tuesday evenings in Madison aren’t the epicenter of any crime waves. Holden’s neat haircut has grown out awkwardly in the month apart, tufting behind his ears, coming into tangled curls at his forehead. There are dark creases of sleep deprivation beneath both of his eyes, which flinch up to meet the arrival bloodshot. There’s trepidation until he recognizes Bill. Emotion drains deliberately. Holden’s chin raises to attention. Bill paces over, sinking down closer to Holden’s level. _Christ, kid, you look worse for a month out of prison._ Gaunter, scruffier, dishevelled. Bill hides a grimace. He should say hello. Or sorry. Some kind of nicety. He looks over towards the barred door, the policeman frowning with keys in hand. Beyond that, half the precinct surely is listening in. 

“You didn’t hit her?” Bill asks finally, arms folded.  
  
Holden shakes his head rapidly.  
  
“What about threatening her?”  
  
He again shakes his head, with the same frantic energy. His lips crack apart, chapped and sticking. “I thought she would have wanted to help. Her husband murdered little girls. She figured out who I was, and she just… she was screaming at me. But I didn’t touch her.”  
  
Bill attempts to evaluate the sincerity of the words. _Fuck, like I’d know whether Holden’s playing me._ “Okay. With me.”

Holden is his slighter shadow every step out of the jail, and then back through the station and to his car. There’s no shortage of filthy looks from Madison PD, but Bill will worry about that burned bridge later, when he tries to cross it to get case files or wrangle another inmate out of jail. Bill unlocks the car, and slides into his seat. Holden makes no move to join him. Bill scowls, leaning over to push the passenger door open. “You can get in.”  
  
“Thank you,” Holden says, folding into the car seat, hands clasped in his lap.  
  
“You know, when you told me you had four friends, I was shocked. I thought, how can a man only have four friends? I should’ve been reeling at the fact that you have a non-zero number of people who actually care about you. You stupid asshole.”  
  
“Thank you for bailing me out,” Holden says, in a clipped tone.

“I didn’t _bail you out_. I got the fucking charges dropped,” Bill blows out, folding his arms. “You look like shit, Holden. When’s the last time you had a shower?”  
  
“I had to move out of my apartment.”  
  
“You’re ...homeless?”  
  
“I’ve been sleeping in my car. It’s temporary. The settlement will come through and--”  
  
“Does Lizbon know? That you haven’t got access to that money yet? She’s the one who cut you off, right?”  
  
Holden gives the tiniest of shrugs. “She doesn’t want anything to do with me.”  
  
“What the fuck did you do to her, Holden?”  
  
“We were arguing. It was... She came over the day... She was angry at me for _our_ argument, and then that turned into an argument in and of itself.”  
  
“Just tell me the unprovoked, awful insult you levelled at her,” Bill says, unamused.  
  
“I told her it was her fault that I got shot.”  
  
“Jesus fucking Christ.”  
  
Holden shudders, obviously wallowing. “I used to do it with my mother, too. I didn’t like being on eggshells, so when I could tell she was angry, I’d deliberately set her off. At least that way I could control when the meltdown occurred.”  
  
“That’s not an excuse, Holden.”  
  
“I know. I--I was in a bad place. I’ve tried to apologize. I returned everything she bought me except the car, and I’ll pay her back for that as soon as--”  
  
“Holden, I’m sure she doesn’t want that,” Bill blows out.  
  
Holden nods miserably, even smaller in the seat beside him. “You were one the four. Friends, I mean. Now I’m down to two, maybe one. I haven’t visited Daniels again. I hate being back at Winnebago.”  
  
“I knew that I was one of the four, Holden,” Bill dismisses, lighting a cigarette. “What’s this about you not taking your meds?”  
  
“I… couldn’t afford them.”  
  
Bill rubs between his eyes. “Are you-- Holden. Why didn’t you--” he tries to breathe tobacco in but there’s guilt crushing his chest. These last few weeks must have been hell for kid.  
  
“When my money comes through, I’ll fill my prescription, I promise. I’m not abstaining due to anything but financial pressure. I want to be medicated.”  
  
“How much? To fill the prescription.”  
  
“Forty eight dollars.”  
  
“For a month?” Bill says, eyes widening.  
  
“That covers… more like… three months,” Holden says, doing some concerted maths. “Most of three months. Largactil is the least expensive. No generics on the market yet.”  
  
“Just as well Madison PD is about to fund your medication into the foreseeable future,” Bill says under his breath. “Okay. Madison has a 24 hour pharmacy, doesn’t it?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Holden murmurs. He crosses his arms across his chest. “Does this mean you forgive me?”  
  
“Do you forgive _me_?”  
  
“For what?”  
  
Bill exhales smoke abruptly, gesturing amongst the tendrils of opaque grey. Holden is not assisting filling blanks. “Threatening to put you in prison, after everything you’ve been through?”  
  
Holden's lips purse. “I _was_ in your car.”  
  
“Holden, don’t be a fucking smartass--” Bill starts to say, but recognizes the earnest gaze from the boy.  
  
He’s seen Holden angry about mistreatment before, from doctors, from other inmates, from law enforcement. But somehow, Holden has warped Bill’s actions to be completely excusable. Just like with his piece of shit, abusive mother. Bill never wants to be in that category.

The deep buried boxes inside Bill’s head are unearthed. The dormant tenderness for Holden escapes his furious repression. “I was in the wrong. I should have let you apologize. I certainly shouldn’t have threatened you with prison, and used my position of authority to intimidate you. I used things you’d told me in confidence against you in an inexcusable way. I was being cruel, because I was angry. You made me angry, but you didn’t make me cruel. I'm sorry, Holden. I'm really sorry you've been sleeping rough like this.”  
  
Holden’s lips twitch through unspoken replies. His eyes dart to the back of the car seat. Hearing voices, Bill thinks. He wants to tug the kid into another hug. Not a good idea, but sentiment gushes arterially into the older man’s words.  
  
“Let’s go get you some dinner,” he mutters, nudging Holden’s ribs through his shirt. “Getting skinny again.”

“Thank you,” Holden says gently. “I would like some dinner. Could we please go past my car? It’s out in Waunakee. It’s parked off Kopp Road.”  
  
“You’ll have to give me directions,” Bill says, starting the car. “I suppose that’s the address of the Bradshaw residence. What the hell were you doing there, Holden?”  
  
“You’re going to be angry at me.”  
  
“Holden,” he warns, glancing over. There's raw animal fear radiating off the young man. Bill adopts a reassuring tone. "...I'm not going to... to lose my temper. Okay? Promise."  
  
“I was asking her about dates that her husband may have been absent on. Mary Creighton hasn’t been very helpful in that regard.”  
  
Bill raises an eyebrow at that. “She’s cooperating with authorities.”  
  
“She’s also constantly falling back on excuses whenever she’s pressed for detail. ‘Oh, that’s years ago, I couldn’t tell you when Greg went away on hunting weekends or fishing trips’. I thought maybe Clementine Bradshaw would be more cooperative, seeing as she didn’t have cover-up involvement to be cautious about implicating herself into.”  
  
Bill wonders how Holden found out where the Bradshaws lived, and how the kid knows what Mary is saying in police interviews. Is Em part of this investigation, phoning in from New York? Has Holden found a mole in Madison PD? “Which dates?”  
  
“Are we pooling investigative resources again?”  
  
Bill blows out smoke, trying to settle himself. “Holden, you’ve gotta quit it with this PI schtick. You will end up in _prison_. The cops in this city hate your guts, innocent or guilty. Your investigation has no legal authority, and the moment you step out of line and break some petty little injuction, they will delight in locking you back up. I just shot to shreds whatever sway I have left there. You need to be careful. ...I’m worried about you.”

 Holden toys with his sleeve, all but whispers the next words. “I’ve found the other victims. I’ve tried the official channels, but nobody wants to listen to me.”  
  
“What do you mean, other victims? You found the bodies?”  
  
“No. There are no bodies-- I mean, there are bodies, but they’re not missing,” Holden murmurs. He’s quiet, seems to be listening to something in the back seat again. Bloodshot eyes dart away into the darkness. “You were right about them not wanting to cast doubt on my guilt. But I think it’s more than just burying bodies at Squirrel Lake. I think they decided to change up their entire MO.”  
  
Bill drags at the cigarette, uncomfortably drawn in. Holden Ford’s theorizing is addictive. “So they left the bodies at the crime scene?”  
  
Holden nods. “I guess I should start at the beginning. I went to Ohio. The old documentary crew trick.”  
  
“Of course,” Bill replies, unamused.  
  
“I found an old yearbook, and then tracked down the people who went to school with Bradshaw.”  
  
“How’d you know which highschool he went to?”  
  
“I… went to his wake and took an in memoriam pamphlet.”  
  
“Holden. I swear. I’m about ready to drive you back to the station,” Bill says, but he’s smiling around his cigarette. “Okay. So you went to Ohio and talked to some classmates. What’d you find?”

Holden seems emboldened by the smile, and opts to ignore the threat. “When he was underage, he set his family home on fire. On purpose, I believe. And then he tried to torch a classmate's home. A girl he'd written love letters to. He was rejected, so he tried to burn her house down while her entire family slept.”  
  
“How the fuck did he enlist in the army?”  
  
“His family’s wealthy. Claimed it was a prank gone wrong. They paid for repairs and the charges went away. ...okay. Next left, onto the highway.”  
  
Bill indicates, changing lanes distractedly. “Jesus, what can’t money buy? ..so, you dug into arson cases.”  
  
Holden nods. “But we’re specifically looking for murders of children, with elements of arson. I figured they’d be using it to destroy evidence.”  
  
“Did you find any crimes that fit that description?”  
  
“Yes. But I only have newspaper archives to work with. It’s been tough, Bill.”  
  
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Bill says, looking him over. Even paler awash with the bright overhead street lights. 

“Turn up here,” Holden says, pointing out an exit. “So. You’ll look over my investigation?”  
  
“Holden, I’m serious. We are not working this case together.”  
  
“You don’t want to work--” Holden starts, offended.  
  
“I don’t want you to go to prison, idiot,” Bill says gruffly, eyes on the road.  
  
Holden is silent, again, as Bill turns off the highway. When Bill looks over, it’s too dark to make out Holden’s expression. But tracked down his cheeks, throwing back the ruby glimmer of a roadside neon sign, are silent tears.


	17. Chapter 17

“Just up there,” Holden mutters, eventually breaking the silence. He’s pointing out a red Dodge Dart sedan. _Christ. Not a lot of footroom for a man just under six feet tall._ Holden wipes his face with his forearm, while Bill’s parking, trying to make the motion subtle, like Bill could have missed the tears.  
  
Bill kills the motor, turning with his arms folded. “You shouldn’t be driving if you’re hallucinating, Holden. _Obviously._ You’re endangering yourself, and everyone on the road.” Holden twitches at the criticism. “How’d you get your license renewed?”  
  
Holden examines the handle of his car door with vigorous interest.  
  
“What? ...no license? Are you serious? Is this some kind of self-destructive thing? ...d’you miss prison food?”  
  
“No. Lizbon was teaching me, and--”  
  
“Okay. You’re not driving _anywhere_ without a fucking license,” Bill says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What was the plan, Holden? If you got pulled over?”  
  
“Say I just got out of prison for a decade, and I’m going for my test soon? Everyone in this town recognizes me.”  
  
“Clem Bradshaw sure did,” Bill says. That shuts Holden up. “Okay, go get your shit. A change of clothes, toiletries, whatever you need for the night. And your fucking newspaper clippings.”  
  
“For the night?”  
  
“I’m obviously not going to let you sleep in a fucking car, am I?”  
  
“Where am I going to sleep?”  
  
“In a motel. ...go, Holden.” 

Holden steps out of the car and into the dimly lit street. The houses around are attractive, multi-storeyed, still glowing with internal life. Bill isn’t thinking about the families sat around at dinner. He’s thinking about the big blocks, the footpath, the houses set far back from the road. A perfect abduction site, but Bradshaw wouldn’t have risked taking a child from his own street. Before Bill’s mind can wander, Holden returns with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He slips his car keys into the pocket of his khaki, corduroy jacket.

“I’ll pay you back for the room, Bill. I’m sure it won’t be long now. ...I’d really like to have a shower before dinner. Could we go there first?”  
  
“I haven’t booked the motel, but, sure,” Bill agrees. “D’you see any on the way?”  
  
“I wasn’t really looking,” Holden says self-consciously.  
  
“Yeah? Me neither,” Bill says, starting the car.

He steers them back out of the fulsome suburban housing, towards the roaring highway. Never was a motel that didn’t have a least a few dozen decibels of noise pollution seeping into its rooms. He hits a strip of restaurants, turns into a grottier side street towards the highway. He covers a couple more blocks before he sees a sign for vacancies.

Holden is awkward inside the double motel room. Two singles would have run up the cost, and more importantly, he couldn’t ensure Holden didn’t take off in the night and commit any more misdemeanours in the name of investigating. In the clear yellow of the overhead light, Bill sees the stubble on the young man’s face. He’d have a pretty decent beard, if he let it grow out, but the idea of Holden anything but clean-shaven bothers Bill. Even the stubble seems wrong on the young man. Bill sets the purchased motel toothbrush and razor in the bathroom, coming out to Holden lingering robotically by the door.  
  
“Well? Pick a bed? Dump your stuff, shower and get into something that doesn’t smell like you’ve run a marathon in it.”  
  
Holden blinks alert, and tosses the backpack on the closer bed. He removes some files, and begins sorting through his clothes, taking them into the bathroom. Bill sighs, sitting heavily on the bed, checking his watch. Getting late. Dammit, he still hasn’t called his wife.

His tone is apologetic off the cuff. “Hey, honey.”  
  
“Bill? Where are you?” Nancy asks, trepidation in her voice. “It’s late.”  
  
“I know. I’m sorry. There was situation, and I had to fly out. I should have called earlier, I’ve just been-- well. Run ragged, I guess.”  
  
“You’re in California?”  
  
“Wisconsin. Don’t worry. It’s… not a _dangerous_ situation.”  
  
“What sort of situation is it?”  
  
_Jesus Christ, Nancy, I wish I knew._ “Breakthrough in a case. An urgent case.”  
  
“But I’ll see you tomorrow?”  
  
“Yeah. Tomorrow. ...I’m sorry.”  
  
Nancy hangs up. Bill gives in to a rumbling, hopeless groan.

He walks a couple of blocks looking for some decent food for Holden, heads back with two Chinese takeout boxes of broccoli chicken. A vegetable, which he’s going to assume Holden’s seen none of these past few weeks. He stops at the tiny, high security liquor store on the corner and buys the second cheapest bottle of bourbon. He asks the man behind the counter about a 24 hour pharmacy, and is met with disbelief. Getting Holden medicated will have to wait until the morning.

The bathroom fan is whirring energetically, but steam has still escaped beneath the door to create a foggy, warm ambience in the motel room. Bill’s surprised to find that Holden is _still_ in the shower, until he remembers it’s his first warm one for at least a month. The kid has laid out his investigation on the counter, pages of obsessively neat handwritten notes and newspaper clippings. Bill takes them over to the couch with his dinner, like leisurely vacation reading. After a couple of horrific sentences, he gets up. No glassware in the cupboards, but he rinses out two coffee mugs and carries them over. He pours himself some bourbon, hesitates, and pours one for Holden. The bathroom lock clicks, and a fresh wave of mist arrives. 

“I’m not seeing whatever it is that you’re seeing,” Bill says of the stack of clippings. He nudges the reading glasses down his nose and looks up at Holden.  
  
The kid looks less like a homeless heroin addict after a shower. The longer hair is in damp curls around his forehead. Still skinnier than he ought to be, but clean, and in a fresh t-shirt. His cheeks are shaved, flushed with heat. “Oh. My files?”  
  
Bill catches himself staring, and looks down. “I’ll hand it to you, you’ve definitely found a string of crimes with the same perp. Solid detective work. But I’m not getting _anything_ that ties it to Creighton or Bradshaw.”  
  
Holden steps over to the small couch, sits down. “Is that for me?” Holden asks, examining the mug of bourbon.  
  
“No chloropromawhatever in your system for it to interact with,” Bill says under his breath.  
  
Holden drinks it, coughing at the taste. “Great, Bill. You buy this in the cleaning aisle?” 

“Never said you needed to drink it. Just eat your fucking dinner,” Bill says, trying not to smile. Of course the kid can’t handle straight spirits. “So what is it?” he asks, impatiently.  
  
“What’s what?” Holden says, opening the container. He looks at the chopsticks defeatedly for a few seconds, and then stands to rattle a fork out of the motel kitchenette.  
  
“You’re smug about something. What’s this case-shattering clue that only Holden Ford, supersleuth, could see?”  
  
“So now I’m on the case, am I?” Holden says, with a mouthful of food.  
  
“Holden.”  
  
“The first one was no forced entry. From then on, the front door locks are busted out.”  
  
“So, they left it open.”  
  
“Not in Chicago.”  
  
“Spare key under a doormat--”  
  
“No. Spare key was still in place. The neighbors confirmed it.”  
  
“How the fuck do you know that?”  
  
Holden looks frustrated by the question. “Do you _want_ me to tell you the truth, Bill?”  
  
“Why do you think I asked?”  
  
“You’re law enforcement--”  
  
“If I was going to arrest you, I wouldn’t have bothered busting you outta jail in the first place. ...have you been stealing case files?” Bill asks.  
  
“I called the local police departments and I told them I was FBI. I said I was _your_ partner.”  
  
Suddenly, driving without a license is a fucking cakewalk. Bill feels sick to his stomach. He sets down the mug. “You’re joking. Tell me you’re fucking joking.”  
  
“Yeah,” Holden says seriously. An even more smug grin reveals itself.

Bill leans over and punches Holden’s arm, hard. “You _shit_ . ...how did you really get them?”  
  
“A man was tried for the first murders. Victims were his ex-wife, and his five year old daughter. He was recently divorced, had a couple of domestic assault charges on his rap sheet from what I understand. There wasn’t much to link him to the crime except that it seemed pretty obvious to the local police that he’d done it. Some forensic evidence that was thoroughly debunked. His fingerprints were on a couple of surfaces inside the house. The defense found a witness, that same neighbor who mentioned the spare key, who said he’d been over a couple of days before the murders, to drop the kid off after a weekend at dad’s.”  
  
“So this is all from the trial transcript?”  
  
“Mhmm.”  
  
“You don’t think he did it?”  
  
“I mean, he’s a real piece of work, but, no, I don’t think he did it. But I think our real perp knew that the police would suspect him no matter what.”  
  
“Someone who knew how police think. Like, say, police,” Bill says, swishing bourbon around his mouth.  
  
“That explains the unforced entry. Bradshaw shows his badge, they get let inside nice and quiet-- it wasn’t a busy street-- I wish I’d taken photographs of the house. Then they realize their mistake, and start busting the locks off back doors. Probably _after_ the occupants of the house are dead. That way, there’s nobody to hear, dial 911.” 

Bill reevaluates the files. “You’ve had a busy month, roadtripping around half the country.”  
  
Holden shrugs. “It didn’t seem like anyone else wanted this case to be solved. I kept trying to take it to local police, but as …as soon as they figure out who I am, they don’t want anything to do with me.” His eyes flicker as he speaks, a tiny grimace of distraction. Still hearing things, Bill decides.  
  
“So, what d’you do for gas money?”  
  
Holden has already finished his broccoli chicken and started on the egg rolls; at this question he seems to lose his appetite completely. “I took the bus.”  
  
“Okay? Bus tickets still cost money. I mean, you must have eaten something this month. ...you stole?”  
  
“No. That would have been far too risky. I don’t want to go back to prison for robbing a gas station register.”  
  
“So what did you do for cash, Holden?” Bill presses.  
  
“I got by,” Holden repeats.  
  
Bill stares at him hard. “How illegal are we-- you know what? I shouldn’t have asked.”  
  
“Thank you,” Holden murmurs. He picks up the bourbon, drains the mug, pours himself more. 

“You go to sleep, kid. Don’t drink that.”  
  
“I’m fine. Let’s keep talking about the case.”  
  
Bill shakes his head. He takes the mug out of Holden’s hands, pours it into his own. “In the morning.”  
  
“They used Bradshaw’s boat. I’m sure of it. They got paranoid about cars after the station wagon had been identified repeatedly, and they started approaching on foot. All homes are within a mile of a dock. They went out on Lake Michigan, found the location of the house they’d-- they went through divorces, or restraining orders, I’m not sure. They found single mothers with young children, young girls, and--”  
  
“Holden, Holden,” Bill pacifies. “You don’t need to keep feeding me case details for this relationship to work, okay?”  
  
“What do you want from me, then?” Holden asks, a strange glint in his eyes.  
  
“I want you to go to bed and get some fucking sleep.”  
  
Holden’s mouth twists. Finally, finally, he nods.

 

 

Holden tosses and turns around the threadbare motel bedding, but eventually the slight figure curls in place. Bill drinks his bourbon and picks through the files to try to contextualize Holden’s assertions. Some part of him is perpetually occupied with the settled breathing from the occupied bed. Another part of him, worrying about whatever the kid did to make ends meet.

Bill can’t sleep for hours, by which point he knows Holden’s theory back-to-front. He settles in to his own set of washed out blue cotton sheets, imagining chemically accelerated fires and boats and a thousand different scenarios in which Holden is arrested and ends up back in prison. Somehow, eventually, it fades to black.

 

Bill wakes suddenly, though he can’t identify what pulled him from sleep. He’s disconcerted a moment, looking over to the bedside alarm clock. The split-flap display shows it’s almost four AM. And he’s in Madison _again_ , he reminds himself. He shifts upright, glancing at Holden’s bed. Empty. A deluge of panic is dammed off abruptly when he sees Holden perched on the far end of the small couch, sifting through papers in the thin filtering streetlight. The curtains are drawn open, barely enough to read in. Certainly beyond Bill’s eyesight.  
  
“What’re you doing?” he asks, disconcerted and sluggish.  
  
The papers fall out of Holden’s hands, and he lurches backwards. “Sorry. Sorry, did I wake you?”  
  
_Maybe. Maybe my instincts told me there was someone lingering like a fucking murderer in the room I was trying to sleep in._ “Why aren’t you in bed?” Bill says, switching the lamp on and sitting up. He didn’t have a change of clothes, seeing as he came straight from Quantico, so he’s sleeping in just his a-shirt, and boxers. His crumpled suit is draped over a coathanger, hooked onto a wall fitting beside the bed. He’s wearing what he’d normally sleep in, more or less, but it feels inappropriate after the grit and gristle of his falling out with the kid. Last thing he wants to do now is appear suggestive.

Holden must have missed the memo about not abrading that tender reminder. He rises from the couch, coming to sit on the edge of Bill’s bed, dangerously close.  
  
“I couldn’t sleep. ...maybe Bradshaw has an interest in sadistic sexual acts with a grown woman. He might have even more victims. You were right, when you said I wasn’t considering his psychology into my equations--”  
  
“Holden. Now isn’t the fucking time. It’s four in the goddamn morning. Go to sleep.”  
  
“Oh. I couldn’t sleep,” Holden says.

Now he’s closer, Bill can smell bourbon. _His_ bourbon, not that he can really blame Holden for trying to medicate away the insomnia. Bill frowns, rubbing his eyes. _Don’t lose your temper._ “Hallucinations?”  
  
Holden nods. “Mostly.”  
  
Bill rattles out a sigh. “Could you _try_ to sleep?”  
  
“I have. ...I’m very grateful you put me up here for the night--”  
  
“Holden, quit it,” Bill mutters. “You’re probably right about Bradshaw, but when I said talk in the morning, I meant _after_ the sun had actually risen.”  
  
“Sorry. I’ll let you sleep.”  
  
“Will you?”  
  
“Yes. If you want to sleep,” Holden says dimly. His fingers are crunched tight in the bedding.

“If I want to sleep? Yeah, I want to sleep. What else am I going to do at four in the morning?”  
  
Holden shrugs, dewy eyes round as saucers. Bill doesn’t think Holden is breathing. Then, the implication settles in.  
  
Bill’s first instinct is fiery rage again, but a look at the desperate young man before him, and the emotion fizzles. “Jesus, Holden, I’m--I’m not doing this for the reasons that you think I am. You don’t have to pay me back for the motel or… or for getting you outta the bullpen...” Bill reaches out, squeezing his shoulder. He feels Holden’s skin shivering beneath the plain cotton. _Christ, I shouldn’t have touched him._ Bill tries to keep his voice firmer than he feels. “Stop trying to play me, Holden. Go to sleep. I’m gonna be here in the morning, and so are you. Okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Holden whispers, picking up his files, darting off.  
  
“Don’t you dare bail on me. We’ve got work to do in the morning, okay, Holden?” Bill says in a pretty transparent attempt at reassurance. Holden curls up into his own bed.  
  
“Okay?” Bill asks again.  
  
“Okay,” Holden whispers wet into the dark motel room.

 

 

He dreams of Holden’s body on his bed, this time beside him, crushed into his arms. Fragile and young and desperate to please. Even in the dream he is horrified, and when he wakes to stark daylight he finds himself monstrous and unnatural. Holden is gone, just as well that he doesn’t need to meet the boy’s eyes. But Holden’s belongings are still on his bed, and the coffee table is still a spread of case files that Bill knows would never be abandoned.  
  
Bill turns the shower too hot to scald his subconscious clean. Holden was right about him after all.


	18. Chapter 18

When Bill gets out of the shower, his mind is made up: he cannot be trusted with Holden. But someone needs to look out for the kid. Only one option avails itself to him. Holden is sitting, reading Bill’s notes for investigative strategy, as if invited to consult in. Bill pulls his suit on in tense quiet, checking the alarm clock. Barely past six. Holden probably didn’t sleep at all.

“Some breakfast,” Holden breaks the silence, gesturing to the plastic bag. “And I found a pharmacy, though it’s still closed. Anyway, there wasn’t enough money in your wallet to fill my script.”  
  
Bill snorts at that, still not quite up to meeting Holden’s eyes. He opens the container: hotcakes. Holden has a sense of fucking humor after all. He picks up the coffee on the counter instead.  
  
“Sorry to just go through your things like that. ...I’m keeping a tab and the moment my money comes through, I will write you a check for any costs incurred.”  
  
“Oh. Assistant, now? Not partner? Tell me, in practical terms, what you think the difference is between those two positions?” Bill says, around a cigarette.  
  
“I’m happy to do any legwork, filing, anything you need me to do, Bill. Unpaid. If you’ll allow me to have access to some information in confidence, I will examine it, and provide you my opinions upon the crime in the context of the vast study I have done into Creighton and Bradshaw’s earlier crimes.”  
  
“And I don’t even have to pay you for it?” Bill asks, tapping ash. “I’m not that fucking stupid, Holden. Get your shit. We’re checking out. Got somewhere we need to be.”  
  
“...do we?” Holden says nervously.  
  
“Yeah. We’re gonna go buy a nice bouquet of flowers, then I’m gonna drive you out to Lizbon’s place, and you’re gonna get on your fucking knees and beg her forgiveness,” Bill says, dead serious. “Before she leaves her house for the morning. Chop chop. Get your shit together.” 

“Bill. You don’t need to--”  
  
“Non-negotiable.”  
  
“I don’t want to make her feel guilty.”  
  
“Well, shit, Holden, then don’t mention that you’ve been sleeping in your car. Say you’ve been sleeping on a friend’s couch.”  
  
“She knows I don’t have any friends in town,” Holden dismisses immediately. His eyes flicker around the room, and he’s up on his feet pacing. His nervousness is torrential; fingers twisting, pacing, sentences flowing into each other in a muddy, churning surge. “I’ll just make her miserable. Once I’ve got enough money to be in a stable environment, I’ll have her over to dinner. I’ll fix things. I promise. Bill, please don’t make me--”  
  
“You do this, and I’ll consider letting you into the Creighton interrogation.”  
  
“... _really_ ?”  
  
“I will _really_ consider it.”  
  
Holden frowns more. “Bill,” he pleads, quietly.  
  
“ _Non-negotiable_ . You do know what that word means, right?”  
  
Holden begins picking up papers in stony silence.

 

 

Holden stays sulky while they check out. Bill gets cash out, for Holden to fill the script clutched insecurely to his chest. And so Holden can buy a bouquet of sunflowers from an indoor market. Lizbon doesn’t like roses, Holden says, and barely a word more than that.  
  
Bill thinks of himself as an authority figure: senior in the FBI, and in the army. He’s experienced at telling people things they don’t want to hear; younger colleagues, army privates, local police boys, he’s not the sort of person to relent because someone’s getting pouty at him. Except, maybe he is, because all he wants to do is let Holden talk him out of this.  
  
The kid is sitting hunched opposite him in the car seat, dedicated to his misery despite Bill turning up the Electric Light Orchestra song on the radio ear-achingly loud. It’s just passing seven when Bill spots the yellow letterbox, turns up the driveway towards Lizbon’s home.

“I can’t go in there,” Holden insists, as they crest the clearing.  
  
“Yeah, you can.”  
  
“Ziezel’s here,” Holden says, pointing out the Chevy Vega. “Last time we spoke, he made it very clear that if he saw me again, I could expect to be leaving the interaction on a stretcher. We should wait for--”  
  
Bill is out of the car before Holden’s logic can worm its way into his mind. There’s honeybees buzzing, and the smell of fruit pollen thick in the air. He knocks on the door, jumpy with anticipation, despite that this emotionally fraught situation is still none of his business.

The door swings open, Quentin’s striped tie hanging about his neck unknotted, a hand up against the bright morning. “Bill? Hey, didn’t realize you were in town,” he says with a perplexed quirk of lips.  
  
“Hey. Quentin,” Bill says, with a fraught smile. “I just got in last night.”  
  
“Kathy didn’t say you were… is that Ford?” he asks, expression dropping off a cliff edge as he looks over Bill’s shoulder and into his parked car.    
  
“He’s here to apologize.”  
  
“He can take that apology and shove it. ...why the fuck did you bring him here?”  
  
“Obviously, they care about each other. I think if he--”  
  
“Care? No, no. He never cared. He _used_ her. You have no idea the amount of money she was forking over for him: the apartment, the car, medication, a therapist, food, fancy clothing. And she did it all without blinking. And that bastard, the _moment_ he guaranteed himself the mountain of cash his lawyers pulled out of a decent police department that’s already stretched too fucking thin? He turns on her. Tells her, it’s her fault he almost died. Yeah. So fast it’d make your head spin. He broke her goddamn heart. I mean that. She’s barely piecing herself back together now.”  
  
Bill stares and then shakes his head, pieces of his own coming together. “Quentin, he hasn’t got any money yet. He’s been sleeping in his car since Kathy cut him off.”  
  
“Is that what he told you?”  
  
“I _saw_ it. He couldn’t fill his fucking prescription, and he’s hallucinating, acting… weirder than usual. He’s lost all kinds of weight. Shit, he’s gonna end up looking like that arrest mugshot all over again.” 

Quentin rubs an eyebrow. “It’s not Kathy’s fault he’s incapable of managing his own damn life.”  
  
“Yeah? And is it the kid’s fault? After his abusive mother, being imprisoned on a crime he didn’t commit, and God knows what the other inmates did to him on the inside? Tell me, exactly how well-adjusted do you think he should be?”  
  
“Why are you so fucking involved with him?” Ziezel asks, folding his arms.  
  
Bill’s chest squeezes with defensive anxiety. “You could ask your girlfriend the same question.”  
  
“Fine. _Fine_ . Bring him in. Just don’t expect me to talk to him.”  
  
“Fine,” Bill replies heatedly, pacing back to the car.  
  
“You didn’t have to--” Holden is muttering.  
  
“Come. Bring your fucking flowers.”  
  
“Bill,” Holden murmurs, shrinking.  
  
Bill paces off before the cataclysm of uncertainty can fully avail itself to him. The vibrant, bustling garden and the idyllic house serve only to make the situation more contrastingly nightmarish. _Nobody to tend that pretty garden,_ echoes a dead child murderer. Finally, he hears Holden’s car door open behind him.  

Ziezel is in the hallway, arms folded, glaring daggers at Bill and then at Holden as he crosses the hardwood threshold. The sunflowers in the hands of the thin, boyish arrival seem pathetically optimistic.  
  
At the other end of the hallway, Kathy has appeared. She’s wearing a red patterned shift, hands twisted into an ugly snarl amongst the luxe folds. “Holden.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Holden whispers disjointedly.  
  
“Why did you come here? I told you that--”  
  
“Bill made me,” Holden blurts out.  
  
Bill narrows his eyes. Of course he’s a fucking snitch. “Holden told me about the situation when I went to get him released from Madison PD’s jail cells,” he says, flatly.  
  
“Jail?” Quentin asks, an eyebrow raising. Bill’s at least somewhat pleased that the only cop he likes in this town wasn’t in on the trumped up charges.  
  
“Clementine Bradshaw accused him of assault.”  
  
“Jesus. What were you doing near her, anyway?” Quentin asks, scowling.  
  
“I-- I was trying to investigate--”  
  
“Look. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Holden’s oldest, dearest friend was completely off the table as his one phone call,” Bill intervenes impatiently. His forearm folds, fingers clenched. _Come on, Holden. Say something loveable._

“You could have still called,” Kathy informs Holden, tersely.  
  
“Of course I wouldn’t have...” Holden mutters, flushing, screwing up the wrapping paper around the sunflowers with clawing fingers.  
  
“Madison PD might have settled, but they haven’t paid him out yet. He’s been--”  
  
Holden’s eyes are on him razor sharp. “Bill, _shut up_.”  
  
“You’ve been _what_?” Kathy asks, frowning.  
  
“Nothing. I’m sorry. Here’s some sunflowers, they didn’t have dahlias,” Holden rushes out, putting them on a hallway dresser, pacing back off out the front door.  
He’s mumbling under his breath to himself as Bill finally catches up to him. Holden turns, shoves him with all his strength. Bill stumbles, but doesn’t lose his footing.  
  
“I get it now. You want to palm me off, right?” Holden says, hot tears in his eyes, screwed up with rage.  
  
“Holden, calm down.”  
  
“No. No, fuck you. You can’t just show up and pretend to care about me for a day, then fucking leave. You can’t keep--”  
  
“Holden,” Bill insists, more firmly.  
  
“I _told you_ not to tell her. She’s going to be so upset,” Holden says, voice cracking. “She doesn’t need this shit, Bill. You have no idea what she’s been through with Nichol-- with her husband passing. She doesn’t need this, and you’re going to toss it all on her because you don’t want to deal with all my crazy.” 

“Okay. I’m sorry, but you know what? It’s okay for people to be upset about bad things happening to you. She thought you turned on her the moment the money came through. It was important she know otherwise,” Bill returns sharply.  
  
“If I punch you, are you going to arrest me for assaulting a federal agent?”  
  
“No, but I wouldn’t do it anyway, son,” Bill says, squinting. “Holden. I came here, away from my goddamn job, away from my family, to save your ass. You’re being paranoid. This isn’t you talking, this is the--”  
  
Holden lunges at him, and Bill jerks backwards out of the way. He grabs Holden’s shirtfront, rattles him upright as Holden loses footing.  
  
“Come back inside,” Bill says, gruff, but not angry.  
  
“No. Fuck you,” Holden says, squirming like salmon up a stream. About as fucking hard to hold onto.  
  
Bill bunches more fabric and shakes him again. “ _Holden._ ”  
  
“Holden,” comes his name again, clearer. Kathy’s eyes are wet too, but she gives a tiny smile. “...don’t go fighting FBI. Come on.”  
  
Holden’s jaw is locked, eyes flitting everywhere in the arborous clearing but Doctor Lizbon.  
  
“Holden, come on, let’s sit down and talk,” she says again. “I want to listen.”  
  
“Tell her. About our fight,” Bill offers low and just for Holden. “What you said to me about your mother.”  
  
Holden blinks several times, shoves Bill off him. He hurries away towards the house. Bill mournfully watches the young man retreating, makes no move to follow. With unsteady hands he lights a cigarette, lumbering towards a tree, leaning heavily back on it. He takes long steadying drags, eyes screwed closed.

 

 

An apologetic voice interrupts his respite. Not Holden, Bill is disappointed to note. Ziezel.  
  
“I’m sorry I was rude, before.”  
  
Bill turns to Quentin’s approach with an unemotive smile. “It’s fine,” he says in a cigarette smoke hand wave.  
  
“How’s the case?”  
  
Bill shrugs. “Kid has some… pretty good stuff. I don’t know. Tricky to say. He doesn’t know how to build a case, with all his conjecture and his criminal psychology in assumptive, unverifiable terms.”  
  
“He should drop that. Let the pros take over.”  
  
“You’re telling me,” Bill says, sagging. _But_ _if the pros handled it, the case would never get fucking solved._ “Are they talking?”  
  
“Yeah. Well, trying to talk. Kathy’s a bit choked up. I think Holden is crying too, I don’t know. I don’t really understand that whole relationship. Holden and I don’t get on.”  
  
_You don’t say._ “...I know it’s not my… look. He needs somewhere to stay. He can’t be sleeping in a car, and I can’t afford to put him in a motel ‘til this lawsuit shit settles up.”  
  
“Kathy’ll have him here. I’m sure.”  
  
Bill rubs his eyes again, down one worry of many. “I should go. I need to make some calls, start getting some resources into Holden’s theories. Can you tell him… I’ll talk to him soon?”  
  
“I’m going into the precinct. Already running behind. Look, if I can help, with the case, I mean, you call me. I don’t like this sweeping it under the rug any more than you do,” Quentin says, spinning his car keys. “...you should go up and talk to them, Bill.”  
  
Bill grits his teeth and looks at the looming, poison arrow tree frog coloured home. “See you around, Quentin,” he says, walking back to his car.

He sits in the driver’s seat, finishing his cigarette miserably as Quentin’s Chevy Vega departs. He’s not sure if he’s being cowardly, or strong-willed. Hadn’t he decided, just this morning, that he shouldn’t be trusted around Holden? Bill starts the engine, flicking through the radio in an attempt to occupy his tumbling and torturing mind. Nothing good on, or nothing good enough to distract him, anyway. He examines the eaves of the vibrant house, tries to reconcile Holden’s friendship with this wholesome and eclectic woman. So far away from the sort of one-track-mind kid who gives over his entire life to amateur sleuthing. He can’t figure that out.  
  
Then again, he can’t reconcile Holden’s friendship with him, either. Decades between them, not a thing in common except an unsolved murder and a traumatic shooting. He makes his decision, turns the car and rolls down the driveway.  
  
The covert retreat fails; flying down the house’s front steps is Holden, bleary eyed but purposeful. He sprints after the car, slapping an open palm on the window until Bill slows to a grimacing stop. “Where are you going?” Holden demands before the window is rolled even an inch down.  
  
“Holden, you need some time to talk to Kathy. I need to do follow up on your cases. ...I’ll call you. I'll call you here.”  
  
“Please don’t go,” Holden rushes out. “You’re my friend, aren’t you? She’s making coffee. Come inside just for a couple of minutes. Please.”  
  
“Kid--” Bill pleads, rubbing crushed worry lines of his forehead. Holden does something stupid to him. Undisapointable. “Okay. _Fine._ Get outta the way,” he says, gruff again.  
  
Holden jumps back. Bill catches the flashing white of a handsome and borderline ecstatic grin.


	19. Chapter 19

“Cigarette?” Bill offers, clicking the tape on with the same hand holding the packet.  
  
“Those things give you cancer, you know,” Gregory Creighton says seriously, raising one bushy eyebrow.The thick moustache is untouched, but his severe haircut has grown out. Possibly an intentional attempt to soften his appearance, though Bill considers it a doomed effort. Creighton is as imposing a figure as ever. Greg looks unfettered by prison life, though Bill has heard there has been a couple of minor incidents. He doesn’t have that certain je ne sais quoi that Holden did, the open invitation to victimize.    
  
“Oh, I do,” Bill replies, lighting the cigarette without a hint of hesitation. “Can’t believe you didn’t pick it up when you served. I could count on one hand the soldiers I knew who didn’t smoke, and most of ‘em were in on some sort of weird religious abstention.” He turns, to his left, and extends the cigarette packet. “I’m guessing that’s still a no from you, Holden.” 

“Mhm,” Holden replies.

Bill turns, finding himself again startled by Holden’s professional appearance. The neat haircut is restored, and the boring suit and tie make him look much older. Like a colleague from the Bureau, which is undoubtedly what Holden was aiming at. He’s alert in the light-filled prison visiting room, rows of tables all empty except for one at the back left, where they sit opposite Creighton. It’s been over a fortnight since Bill scooped Holden out of Madison PD’s precinct jail. He’s gained back at least a few pounds of the lost weight, and is thoughtfully composed instead of the twitchy, uneven mess. Bill spoke to Lizbon, gathers that Holden’s heading back to university part time. NYU, like Em, Bill’s pretty sure.   
  
Holden hasn’t updated him at all on his personal life, even though they speak at least every few days. Maybe it's Bill's fault for not asking. They only ever talk the case. 

“You haven’t picked up the dirty Brooklynite habits yet, huh?” Bill asks the young man.  
  
“Em rarely smokes these days. You did throw her into an incredibly stressful situation,” Holden says comfortably. He’s baiting Greg, whose eyes snap over and become inscrutably dark. Not too estranged to not know his daughter’s nickname. She’s been going by it since high school, before she moved away from Madison.  
  
“I smoked when I served. I gave it up. Didn’t give up the respect service taught me, though,” Creighton interjects, a threatening edge to his voice. He’s evaluating Holden’s appearance stringently. Bill’s pleased to see the dislike of Holden off to a fervid start. That’s what’s going to make him stupid.

 

 

When Holden first proposed using Creighton’s disdain of Holden against the child murderer, Bill thought it sounded too simple to be effective. A little too close to good-cop-bad-cop. He can see the dynamic that Holden anticipated perfectly.  
  
“Like respect for the sanctity of human life?” Holden asks, fully inhabiting his character of ‘annoying little shit’. Probably not all that much acting going into this particular performance.  
  
“Like respect for your seniors, your superiors,” Greg counters, teeth gritted.  
  
“In what ways are you my superior, exactly? Body count?”  
  
Greg ignores that one, pulling himself upright. That has him above Holden’s seated height, by at least an inch. His chest expands, pressing from within on the neat, collared uniform. Plain, ubiquitous blue. Indigo bright-- probably to spot escapees. Greg’s grey eyes zero in on Bill as if he’s the only interviewer. “You’re going to regret this. When you figure out that he’s been misleading you all along.” 

“Yeah? Some seriously bad luck on your behalf. Coincidentally trying to kill him at the exact same spot he disposed of all those bodies,” Bill says, takes a drag of his cigarette and settles back to lounge in his chair.  
  
“ _He_ directed us there.”  
  
“But you _were_ going to kill Holden Ford beside Squirrel Lake,” Bill prompts, setting a steady pace of inquiry.  
  
“Look, I’ve already admitted I told Tony to go over, help Mary out with questioning. You know how it is, Bill. Sometimes the guilty man doesn’t want to confess. Sometimes the evidence that proves that he’s guilty just won’t convince a courtroom. Won’t even be let into a courtroom. Tony was a _good_ cop. Part of being a good cop is being a bad person,” Greg says, inhaling through his nostris. “We were worried his appeal would work, and he’d walk free thanks to these liberal fucking courts. If it means keeping a child murderer off the streets, keeping the little girls of Madison safe, then, yeah, we’ll execute one piece of shit.”

Holden seems unperturbed by the insult, or the plain dismissal of his due process. He looks to Bill to continue the line of questioning.  
  
“The little offroad lakeshore where you took your daughter camping, it coincidentally ended up being a mass grave?” Bill asks, keeping his tone receptive even if the words themselves are heaped with disbelief.  
  
“I _never_ took her there. She and Ford are so fucking close now, out of the blue, huh? Never occurred to you she mighta decided to frame me, to bust her prison boyfriend out? That little whore would say anything to anyone.”  
  
Bill sees Holden’s fingers underneath the table clench to fists. _Come on, Holden, don’t be stupid._  
  
“She’s very well, not that you asked about your daughter’s health. She just did sound for a punk band she’s loved for years. She’s probably going to have her second graduation next fall,” Holden says conversationally, though the subtext is clear enough. She’s out there in the world flourishing, while you wither in your prison cell.  
  
“You don’t touch her,” Greg snaps. “Or once I get out of here, you and I are going to have a serious talk, boy.”  
  
“Em gets to choose, now, Greg,” Holden says in a low, poisonous tone.

Bill really hopes it’s mindgames, all this insinuation of a relationship. She’s six years younger than Holden. That’s why he’s so ornery about it, he tries to convince himself. “Maybe Bradshaw was the one playing you. He ever tell you about his youthful penchant for arson?”  
  
That catches Greg’s attention. Holden’s parallel investigation is lent legitimacy by the suddenly crossed arms. The chained wrists jangle, and settle against his jutted chest. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  
  
“Oh, he was a real piece of work. Set the house of his unrequited childhood crush up in flames,” Bill says levelly. “If he fooled you, you wouldn’t be the first. Wife still swears up and down that he was a decent man. And you know he’s been linked to the several crimes across state lines. We’ve got him in Tristan Road, Waukegan. Burned down a house. Assaulted a mother, then her five year old daughter. An eyewitness puts him at a dock not five minutes walk,” he lies fluidly. “And Burns Harbour, Indiana. Another arson. I guess Tony didn’t tell you about that.”  
  
“You think you just pin whatever you want on a dead man? Tony isn’t here to defend himself thanks to that little psycho sitting beside you. Maybe think about that before you drag him through this filth.”  
  
Bill looks at Creighton in close consideration. “I’m sorry your friend is dead,” he says, seriously, trying not to sneer with the distasteful lie. “I know what it’s like, when you’ve served with someone. That bond doesn’t break.”

“Well. Just keep it respectful,” Greg says, unfolding his arms.  
  
“Respectful of the child murderer--” Holden asks disbelievingly.  
  
“Respectful of the dead,” Bill cuts Holden off. Holden’s lips twist to a pout, but Bill keeps himself stern, unyielding. He stares the younger man into submission.  
  
"Well, anyone who has to drug someone up to get a confession is a pretty shitty cop in my opinion, dead or not," Holden says, under his breath.  
  
Creighton's sneer grows more pronounced. "A truly awful person like you would never have a conscience call. He did what he had to."  
  
"How did you decide I was guilty?" Holden asks, a little abrupt. "Em's aunt told you I was babbling about the case, and that was enough to--"  
  
"What?"  
  
"You heard I was talking about the missing girls, from Em's aunt. Genevieve Creighton. She was a nurse at St. Mary's when I went through after a suicide attempt," Holden says, uninterested in the denial.  
  
Creighton laughs, cold and cocky. " _Suicide attempt,_  sure _._ Attention seeking behavior if I ever saw it. Killing yourself could have been the only decent thing you ever accomplished, Ford. But you failed that too. ...Genevieve had nothing to do with it." 

"Did a psychic tell you? Because you can't always trust their hunches in criminal cases," Holden fires back.  
  
"Eileen Ford called up Madison Homicide. Wanted them to know that her only son was the Madison Child Murderer. She couldn't prove it, but my, you have to trust that maternal instinct. ...oh. Mommy never told you? She was the one who put you on our radar. Your own mother knew you were a monster, boy."  
  
Holden's lips contort to a hurt snarl. He opens his mouth, snaps it closed, unable to even hurl a sarcastic retort.  
  
Bill's fingers are too tight on the cigarette. He loosens them before he breaks it, reminds himself to sound friendly. _Don't let your voice give away how close you are to knocking this table aside, beating this disgusting old pedophile into a bloodied mound of flesh._ "I still need answers, Greg. You gotta explain why Bradshaw was in Illinois when a house went up in flames. The coincidence seems pretty dang unbelievable."  
  
“If I could help you with that, I would. I--” Greg starts to say. There’s the jangle of keys at the door. Lunch, which means an abrupt end to the scheduled interview, or else risk making Creighton annoyed and uncooperative.   
  
Bill is disappointed, and relieved at once. There was progress, but he knows it came at a cost. For every inch forward with Creighton, Holden is backsliding down the cliff edge into his awful past.

Creighton is led off, and Bill stands as he leaves, almost as to a superior military officer. He outranked Greg when he served, but pointing that out is hardly conducive to the desired dynamic. He sits again, once the prisoner is led off, and finally turns to his interview partner.

Holden leans forward, stopping the tape. His fingers are shaking so much he almost misses the button. He drags his hands back in his lap, trapping them against each other, two bear traps snapping each other violently still.  
  
“Holden, you doing okay?” Bill murmurs.  
  
“I hate being here,” Holden says, glaring out of the corner of his eye at a guard’s turned back.  
  
“You asked to--”  
  
“I know what I asked for,” Holden responds darkly, taking off out of the visiting room, and down the corridor. For all his speed, he still waits for Bill at security. Not quite brave enough to step through alone. Still afraid that somehow he’ll end up on the other side of the barred door. Holden waits jittering impatiently as Bill picks up his gun, and then hurries down the linoleum staircase before conversation can resume.

 

 

Bill doesn’t try to match the younger man’s nervous pace. He’s Holden’s lift, so he’ll get answers one way or another. He lights another cigarette as he walks thoughtfully out of the reception area, pushing the double doors out. He makes it to the parking and glances back up at the towering structure, hexagonal towers jutting out from the cool-toned bricks. Every window is barred, every door is reinforced. Nightmarish, with or without Holden’s experiences on the inside. The ex-con is facing away from Dodge, eying off a distant industrial estate, fiddling with something in his palm.  
  
Bill exhales, exhausted despite it being barely past eleven. Not much sucks your soul like playing nice with murderers. “Holden. It’s all bullshit. I know that.”  
  
“What?” Holden asks, nervously spinning keys on his finger. His keychain is a cheap tourist Statue of Liberty, flattened pewter jostling the key blades for front spot. The dangerously fast metal barely misses his knuckles each round.  
  
Bill frowns uneasily as he watches the rotation gaining speed. “I have your back every step of this. I am a brick wall to his excuses. I’m following your strategy, okay, Holden? Because I _trust_ you.”  
  
Holden stops twirling the keys, catching them into his fist in a sharp motion. He loosens his hand, and they dangle free, hanging calm once more. “...okay,” Holden murmurs, consoled.

Bill puts a firm hand on the younger man’s shoulder, even though he set himself a rigid ‘no touching Holden’ rule on his flight from Virginia. “Now, if being in a room with Gregory Creighton is getting to you, if being at this prison is getting to you, then I’ll come here alone tomorrow. You can help me on the case without getting dragged into Dodge Correctional. Jesus, Holden, nobody at the Bureau was that peachy keen on me bringing in a civilian.”  
  
“My--our strategy was working.”  
  
“There’s a Japanese word for functional strategies that rely on casualties. That’s not how we do things in America.”  
  
Holden laughs bitterly. “So, I’m what? A kamikaze interviewer? Don’t be melodramatic. This isn’t going to kill me, I’m just-- I’m just--”  
  
“Miserable,” Bill finishes, frowning, squeezing harder through the black fabric. “I’m going to call Wendy this afternoon. Walk her through the interview so far. We could pick up some lunch, if you want to sit in?”  
  
“Chinese?”  
  
Bill shrugs. “I was thinking burgers. Whatever.”  
  
“Oh,” Holden says, simply. “Okay.”  
  
“Okay, as in, you’ll come?”  
  
“Of course,” Holden says with a weak smile. He leans into Bill’s hand, the splayed fingers, the gold wedding band. “I keep expecting you to stop believing me. I’m sorry.”

Bill pats him, too hard, too friendly. His hand drops away from the soft, hardly worn suit, struggling between emotional legitimacy, and exposing himself too much to Holden’s magnetism. His tongue contorts behind his gritted teeth, with the words he’s trying to give voice to. “Holden, your mother--”  
  
“Can we talk about this later?” Holden interrupts.  
  
“Sure,” Bill says, quietly. “Later.” _So, not at all._ “Your mentions of Em seemed to get under Creighton’s skin. But, because she doesn’t have any decent older men in her life, it falls to me to say: If you hurt that girl, I’m gonna break both your fucking knees out from under you.”  
  
Holden blinks, a sly smile forming. “Hurt her?”  
  
“Not a fucking joke, Holden.”  
  
“Bill. I’m not her type. I’m _really_ not her type. ...I’m pretty sure she’s back together with Miriam. You know, Quentin’s daughter?”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Don’t tell Quentin.”  
  
“Oh. Uh. Okay.”  
  
“Is that a… problem?” Holden asks intensely.  
  
“No.”  
  
Holden’s shoulders lose their riveted tightness. He nods to himself as he steps away, waiting patiently for Bill to unlock the car. He sits compact in the car seat, staring off into space. He doesn’t move much as they peel out of Dodge Correctional's parking lot, and towards the safety of the main road.

Bill can sense Holden’s doing something close to emotional processing. He only breaks the meditation from a sense of necessity, as they approach the turn off that angles towards Holden’s hotel. “Do you need to go past your room for anything?”  
  
“No,” Holden answers, dreamy. “Do you think he was lying?”  
  
“Yeah. Freely and fluently. About what, Holden?”  
  
“My mother going to Bradshaw.”  
  
“...no. I don’t think he was lying about that. Fits what I know of Eileen Ford.”  
  
“And then she testified against me. She really did think I was guilty.”  
  
“Maybe. Maybe she just wanted you out of her life.”

Holden considers that, apparently impassive. “I suppose that makes sense.”  
  
“Makes sense?”  
  
“Well, she wanted me to move out--”  
  
“She was a stupid, malicious _bitch_ who didn’t know how great her son was. And the sooner you get that through your thick skull, the better,” Bill says too loudly. Holden is beyond words. Just as well, Bill’s temper is risen enough without bickering back and forth about Holden’s shitty mother. He leans over, turning the radio on, and then up louder as soon as it crackles to life. “And I don’t want to have to keep having these fucking arguments with you about what you do and don’t deserve from--” he starts, loud, even though he was the one who put the music on.  
  
“Thanks,” Holden calls. He reaches out, turning the volume down. “Thanks,” he repeats, soft, warm, like sunset in spring.  
  
“Don’t mention it,” Bill says, glancing over. He’s not prepared for the wide-eyed adoration returning his way. The car swerves several degrees left. Bill opts to watch the road instead of his interrogation partner.


	20. Chapter 20

“Cheeseburger?” Bill asks his passenger as he indicates into the drive thru. A decent queue, but he supposes it’s coming up on the lunch rush. He finally risks a glance over at Holden. The hypnotic expression is thankfully gone.  
  
“Sure,” Holden replies, as he's squinting through the bright sunlight towards the plastic signage. _Who the fuck doesn’t know the McDonalds menu? ...people who’ve spent a lot of time in prison_ , Bill thinks, answering his own question.  
  
“Coke?”  
  
“Uh. Yeah. Sure.”  
  
“Fries?”  
  
“I’ll just have whatever you’re having. Let’s make it easy.”  
  
_Yeah, because Holden Ford loves to do things the easy way._ Bill hums under his breath, doubles his own order, and hands Holden the paper bag as he drives the last few blocks to his motel. Holden trails after him into the single motel room.  
  
“This is where we stayed, right?” Holden asks, which he obviously knows the answer to. Bill wonders what subtext he’s missing.  
  
“Yeah. Cleaner than most of the rooms I get. Soft sheets,” Bill answers, slumping onto the couch. Holden carries over the food, dividing it between them, unwrapping his burger gingerly.  
  
Bill takes a few bites before he’s compelled to break the weight of silence. “So. You got a place in New York.”  
  
“A friend of Em’s was looking for a roommate. She put my name forward. And then, after the fact, asked me if I wanted to move to New York. ...I think she was worried about me spending time in Madison.”

“But you’re at NYU, now, right?”  
  
Holden looks up sharply from his food, one eyebrow raised.  
  
“Kathy mentioned something about--” Bill starts on his excuses at once.  
  
“I will be. In the spring. My transcript is a fucking mess, but I resat a couple of admission tests, grovelled to a some administrators. ….no full ride this time around,” he adds bitterly.  
  
Bill didn’t know that Holden had a full ride at UW, back in ‘66. He’s not exactly surprised, with how smart the kid is. Without his mental illness, and Eileen Ford’s malicious interference, he probably would have graduated summa cum laude. Not the type to skip study for frat parties. Not the type to get an _invite_ to frat parties. “What are you gonna study?”  
  
“Well, bridging units for now, but eventually psychology. ...Wendy’s giving me advice on the undergraduate units I should be picking up, and the lecturers I need to be skeptical of.”  
  
Bill chuckles around a mouthful of beef. “So, school starts in spring. What’re you doing with yourself ‘til that rolls around?”  
  
Holden shrugs unenthusiastically. “Cleaning the venue Em does sound at, for cash-in-hand. Got a lot of experience on cleaning detail. Beats scrubbing out crusty prison shower drains. ...maybe. It’s a pretty disgusting bar." He takes an unconcerned mouthful, as Bill grimaces and stops chewing his food until the imagery fades. "I’ve been trying to find a better job.”  
  
Bill feels pity entrenching itself. _A mind like Holden Ford’s, wasted mopping floors. ...it’s only until he’s done with university,_ he tries to reassure himself.

Holden is holding the burger by his lips, but not biting in, hiding his expression behind the fast food. He mumbles the next words sheepishly: “Writing, too. Awhile back I got contacted by a publishing company, wanting to buy my story. I said no then, but… you know, the settlement isn’t gonna last forever.”  
  
Bill tries not to frown. _Great. Just what I fucking need, Holden Ford’s tell-all autobiography dragging my professional reputation into the gutter. Shepard’s gonna love this._ But the economic reality is beyond reproach. The book will probably fly off the shelves. It’s a compelling enough story, and even though he’s only read case notes, Holden seems a decent writer. Eloquent. Insightful. Knows how to push a narrative. “Okay, bad etiquette to ask after financials, but how much did you get? Quentin made out like you owned half of fucking Madison by the time your lawyers were done.”  
  
The burger goes down. Holden examines the sesame seed bun. “One hundred and five thousand,” the young man admits softly.  
  
It sounds like an absurd amount of money to Bill, at first. Almost triple his yearly salary. More than double, at least. But then the practicality settles in. Holden was deprived of his youth, his potential, any chance of turning his life around from the decrepit mess it had been in ‘67. Even if the lawyers didn’t know how hellish the prison term had been for Holden, it’s insulting. “For ten fucking years of your life? What’s that? Ten grand and change per year of time served?”

“Their lawyers said I wasn’t doing anything with my life anyway. No economic loss. I couldn’t even keep a job at a gas station.”  
  
“Bullshit. You woulda got medicated, and gone on to--”  
  
“I probably would have just killed myself,” Holden remarks casually. “At some point. And I confessed. That was a big sticking point. Brought it on myself.”  
  
“No, you didn’t. You were drugged--”  
  
“There’s no way of proving that, since I shot Detective Tony Bradshaw, and Mary didn’t see anyone administer anything.”  
  
“I told you to get a good lawyer, Holden.”  
  
“I did. He said… he said I shouldn’t let it go to a jury. I agreed, with how widely unlikeable I am.”  
  
“You’re not unlikeable.”  
  
Holden scoffs. “Yeah? Have you let Madison, Wisconsin know?”  
  
“People _like_ you. Nancy thought you were, you know, a nice kid. When she saw you interviewed.”  
  
“Nancy?” Holden asks puzzled, and then his eyes widen sharply. “Oh. Your wife.” 

“Yeah. Nancy, my wife. She saw you on the news.”  
  
“You talked about me with her?” There’s a strange, fascinated edge to Holden’s voice.  
  
“Uh… no. No, not then. I mean, I’ve explained the case, but uh... we had our falling out. You know. When I threatened to arrest you?” Bill says, pinching his forehead. Still can’t mention it without being swamped by guilt.  
  
Holden nods solemnly.  
  
“Wasn’t really looking to talk about that, not with Nance. Then I’d have to get into explaining what offended me, and, uh…” Bill’s pretty sure the point makes itself. He takes a few fries.

“I’m sorry about that-- don’t--” Holden says, as Bill opens his mouth to rebut. “No, listen to me. Okay, you were an asshole--”  
  
“I sure was.”  
  
“And you did provoke me, but that has to be the worst insult I've ever voiced. Especially directed at someone I care about. Even blaming Kathy for getting shot was nothing compared to what I said to you… I don't want to lash out at people I care about. I don't want to be like her. I think I… I must have misinterpreted some moments between us, and I’m sorry. Sorry if I was inappropriate that night I was unmedicated and staying with you in this very motel. I really would like to keep in contact, Bill. After this case is over,” Holden says very softly. “I’d like to say I stay awake at night, tossing and turning, trying to figure out how to crack Creighton in interviews. But… that wouldn’t be true. The thing that keeps me up is that when we break him, this is all over. I don’t get to pretend I’m your colleague any more. ...I don’t get to pretend I’m your friend.”

Bill breathes deep the stale air of the motel room, a present-moment nostalgia settling in, as if he’s watching the unfolding scene through memories. Holden is open to him in the most unexpected way. There’s tingles of dangerous electricity starting to play across his skin. Shouldn’t be alone in a motel room with this kid. “I don’t think staying in contact is such a good idea, Holden.”  
  
Hurt flickers across Holden’s tight lips as he composes himself. “I respect your boundaries--”  
  
“For you.” It’s strange, to just be honest, but after so much bullshit with Holden, finally admitting it is cathartic. “You weren’t, you know, completely wrong. Being your knight in shining armor did feel good. Having you relying on me for your freedom was a hell of a power trip. And I was letting myself go on it.”  
  
“You were trying to help me. You wanted to do the right thing. A symptom of your overdeveloped conscience, Bill.” The words could be insulting if Holden’s tone wasn’t so reverential.

Bill folds his arms. “Yeah, okay, I wanted to lock up the real murderer. Doesn’t do away with the fact I _relished_ every moment you needed me.”  
  
“Needed might not be the right word for it.”  
  
“No?”  
  
“Wanted might be closer,” Holden murmurs, toying with his fries, chasing them around with fingertips.  
  
“Holden,” Bill forces out, trying to restrain the exasperation.  
  
Holden looks up. “What?”  
  
“Could you not do… _this_? This shit?”  
  
“What are you gonna do? Cut me out of your life?” Holden asks sullenly. “You’re gonna do that anyway.”

“Did you not hear me? It’s for _your_ sake.”  
  
“Like I’m some pure, innocent thing. I should be counting my lucky stars that you even looked twice at me--”  
  
“Don’t be stupid, Holden. _Holden_ !” Bill almost yelps, as Holden’s hand goes to his knee. He knocks it away maybe too hard. “Holden, I’m happily married, with a kid-- okay, so maybe not _that_ happily, but-- you deserve so much more than this. Please. I’m going to be your friend after this is over. So fucking _stop it_ , alright?”  
  
Holden’s hands go to his sides, tightening to restrained fists. As if he's back in the chains he wore for so long. He scoffs under his breath, and glowers into the repetitive, concentric squares of the brown motel room carpet. When he speaks, it's ominously tranquil. “I don’t think you need me for the call with Wendy. What time are you going to Dodge tomorrow morning?” 

Bill knows letting Holden go off alone is a terrible idea, but Holden staying will lead to a mistake Bill will never be able to repair. He clears his throat indecisively before he speaks. “I’ll pick you up around eight forty five. You need a lift back to your motel?”  
  
“I’d prefer to get a taxi.”  
  
“Are you gonna be--”  
  
“I’m going to dinner with Kathy,” Holden says through gritted teeth. Bill can hear echoes of their past argument, about palming Holden’s crazy off onto someone else.  
  
“...okay. I’m counting on you tomorrow. You know that, right?”  
  
Holden nods with eye contact averted. He’s fixing his tie as he stands, leaving his food unfinished. “Thank you for the burger, Special Agent Tench,” he says hollowly. He lets himself out.

 

 

Madison is still in the throes of morning chill as Bill pulls up to the curb in a no standing zone, gesturing Holden into the car. Holden jogs over, but the composure doesn’t slip an inch as he slides into the passenger seat.  
  
He’s withheld and stringently polite as Bill offers him one of the takeout coffees in the cupholders, asks him about his dinner, his night’s sleep, anything to try to renew the friendly dynamic attained yesterday. He explains Wendy’s advice: blame diffusing language, Holden’s petulant undermining of Creighton’s criminal capabilities. Nothing from the kid. Holden drinks the coffee to avoid talking, completely unyielding as they turn on to the highway.

Bill can’t stomach the coldness between them. First he turns the radio on, then off, turning almost 90 degrees to the passenger side, only one hand on the steering wheel. “You should become a PI. Already on two outta three. Why not just go all in?”  
  
Holden finally has to immerse himself in the conversation, if only to satisfy curiosity. “Two out of three?”  
  
“Yeah, when you were outta your mind on champagne and Largactil, I listed three options for your future. Go back to school, write a book, set up shop as a PI. You’re on two of three.”

Holden clears his throat disbelievingly, brow knotted. “I barely remember that. If you’re implying I’m basing my entire future on some throwaway comment--”  
  
“You don't need much in the way of qualification, and I think you’d be really good at it. You understand human behaviour better than anyone I’ve ever seen. PI work is not all photographing cheating divorcees and tracking down insurance fraudsters. Lots of people pay good money for someone to try to figure out what happened to their missing loved ones. Law enforcement doesn’t have the manpower for the sort of investigations that you seem to whip up from thin air and force of will. I mean, hell, your book'll drum up publicity for your detective work. ...it would give us an excuse to talk, too,” Bill says, glancing over and hoping to see Holden’s turned shoulders softening. The young man is giving him nothing. Self-possessed and ice cold. Like their interviews in Winnebago. “I could, you know, swoop in and take all the glory once you’ve pieced together a watertight criminal case.”  
  
The young man is still angled firmly away from Bill. His narrowed eyes pick apart the passing countryside.

Holden still doesn’t reply, as they turn onto Highway 151. The road is bright grey with dispersed sunlight, the dried fields on either side leafed with molten gold of morning. And then, mute except for Bill’s momentary exchange with the front gate security, they’re pulling through the high barbed wire and into the expansive, barren parking lot of Dodge Correctional. They don’t even speak as they make inside to the interview room.  
  
Greg Creighton is already seated, same spot, and Bill takes the same chair and pulls a cigarette out, reconsiders and pushes it back into the packet. He reaches for the tape recorder, starts it rolling.  
  
"You mind if I record this?" he asks Creighton, though the recording has already begun.  
  
"Go ahead," Creighton says. In better temper, today. Or maybe just fonder of Bill. Hard to believe this is the same man that almost shot him dead in some lightless Wisconsin forest. 

“Morning, Greg.”  
  
“Good morning, Bill,” Greg says, genially.  
  
Holden raises an eyebrow at Creighton, lips curving up in a cruel smile. “Morning, Inmate 941.”  
  
_Wow, right into it._ Bill wonders if Holden is using Wendy’s advice about antagonistic interview technique as a pretext to blow off steam. “What was your number, Ford?” he asks. It has to feel like a two-versus-one to Creighton, if the strategy is going to work. That puts the world against Holden Ford. As usual.  
  
“522,” Holden supplies unsteadily. If it’s acting, or a genuine response to the trauma of his time on the inside, Bill can’t tell.

“You didn’t like Dodge much, did you? How are you finding it, Greg?” Bill asks, turning back to the tall, uniformed man opposite.  
  
“Well, I treat people with respect, and they mostly treat me with respect in return. There’s the odd unrepentant thug who’ll take a swing at me because I was a cop. But there’s a code in here. You watch the backs of those around you, and they watch yours.”  
  
It sounds like thinly veiled racism to Bill, but he nods along.

Greg is probably rubbing shoulders with Aryan Nation, or whatever the local Wisconsin chapter of redneck white supremacism goes by. If Holden had any talent for self-preservation, he would have tried to ingratiate himself into a white power gang. But he obviously didn’t; Jethro Daniels, Holden’s only friend on the inside, was African American.  
  
Bill looked up the case: Daniels is in his late forties, serving life without the possibility of parole. Commited a string of increasingly severe armed robberies, but didn’t hurt a soul until shot his own brother in the back of the head execution style. Severe delusional states, but no concrete diagnosis of schizophrenia. Maybe he and Holden bonded over their shared past of multiple suicide attempts. Creighton would undoubtedly describe Jethro Daniels as an ‘unrepentant thug’. In Bill’s opinion, Daniels was sentenced far too harshly, but a black man with a criminal history was never going to receive any leniency from the American legal system. If he wasn’t so mentally ill, Daniels would be in Dodge Correctional right beside Creighton.  
  
Bill realizes he’s devolved into contemplation mid-interrogation. _Stick to the mission._ “I heard you’re filing an appeal.”

“Of course I am. I’ve been framed by the same subhuman you’ve brought along to what _could_ have been a perfectly civil interview,” Creighton complains.  
  
“You’re hoping for a retrial,” Bill furthers.  
  
“I sure am. They pulled the jury from Milwaukee, but that wasn’t far enough, if you ask me. Not while Ford was out there, poisoning people’s minds, doing interviews on every late night news show he could, spinning his malarkey story of cruel police injustice and hardship.”  
  
Holden sits up in his chair a little, a tiny smirk in the corner of his mouth. “It’s emotionally draining, isn’t it? Appeal after appeal that in your heart, you _know_ will fail. Hard to sit through those calls with lawyers stringing you along nickel and dime. ‘Oh, this next one, this has to work’, and ‘we’ve put together a new strategy for you this time’.”  
  
“I have the truth on my side, boy. You never did.”  
  
“I had something better. I had Bill.”  
  
_Now, that is not part of the strategy_ . Bill’s eyes widen, and he realizes he might have to drag Holden out of here by the scruff of his neck. This is what you get for inducting an unstable civilian in FBI business. 

Holden isn’t done. “Bill’s here to solve the case. I’m here because I hate you. I really do. I hate you for what you did to me, and what you did to Em, and I want to see you fry. And we will ship you over to be tried in a state with capital punishment. Em and I will sit front row, holding hands, as we watch the show of our lives: Gregory fucking Creighton, sizzling into oblivion.”  
  
“I wasn’t there. Bradshaw did it alone,” Greg says abruptly, voice thinning, wheezing.  
  
“We know that’s not true. That eyewitness in Waukegan? Bill lied to you. She picked you _both_ out. We’ve got Bradshaw’s boat, ‘The Maiden Voyage’, recorded by the marina you stopped in. We’ve got your size fifteen and a half boots in a blood print where the fire didn’t reach. You order your shoes custom, don’t you, Greg?”  
  
“Holden,” Bill interjects, grabbing the younger man’s shoulder. _They don’t have any of that shit. What the hell is Holden playing at?_

“Chicago PD is firming up for the case of the fucking century,” Holden says, a wide smile, trying to shrug off Bill’s brutally suppressing hold. “Bill thinks a plea deal will eliminate the uncertainty of a trial, but he’s law enforcement. He’d prefer to clear a case than roll the dice for an execution. But fuck that. You’re not signing away your extradition--”  
  
“ _Holden_ ,” Bill snaps, though he’s finally comprehending the method in the madness.  
  
Holden shoves Bill’s hand off him, plastic chair scraping back and tumbling over the sticky linoleum. The boy’s face looks so wrong warped into a spiteful sneer. “I’ll see you in Chicago,” he promises Creighton, storming out of the room in a flurry of unbuttoned suit jacket, and bloodshot angry eyes.  
  
Bill feels fury settling in cold and betrayed, as his eyes trail after Holden. He should go lay into that little bastard for--  
  
“I’ll get in touch with my lawyer,” Creighton says, the once-proud tenor finally reduced to a plea.

Bill’s gaze snaps back to the prisoner. _Oh, god. He really sees us as allies._ “There’s nothing I can do, Greg,” Bill says, standing, picking up the tape recorder. He doesn’t pause it.  
  
“No, there is. You come back tomorrow, and I’ll-- I’ll make sure you get all the information you need to put these cases behind you. We don’t have to do this the hard way. ...Tony did it all. I’ll walk you through it. Anything you need to close the case. He just-- I was just-- I wasn’t going to kill them.”  
  
Bill pauses, sits down. “Why did you let him drag you out to Illinois, then?” he asks unhappily, straining, like he’s trying his best to see Greg’s side.  
  
“We were supposed to be going fishing. But Tony, and his fires and his-- his temper, I didn’t-- I didn’t know. None of them were supposed to die,” Creighton rushes out, panicky and so fucking dumb that Bill almost can’t believe it. But he’s seen it before, men faced with the death penalty breaking down into cowardly wretches. This is fear. Animalistic, existential fear is flowing out of Creighton, and with it, the long repressed confession.

 

 

An hour and a half later, Bill exits Dodge Correctional into midday sunlight. He paces towards his parked vehicle, a red sedan, and finds Holden slumped back against a car tire.  
  
The kid looks completely spent, sat down on the bitumen like a puppet with strings all cut. His tie is loosened, suit jacket still hanging open. He pulls himself up on the car door when he sees Bill approaching, flinching like he’s expecting to be laid out. “He’s going to talk, isn’t he?”  
  
“You little asshole. You wanna run your fucking late night cop show bullshit past me first next time?” Bill growls, getting too close.  
  
“So say you planned it. Come on. He’s gonna talk. You should be thanking me.”  
  
“I haven’t punched you, Holden. That demonstrates an unfathomable measure of gratitude, after you pull that fucking stunt. ...he’s not _going_ to talk. He did talk. Said he was just an accessory. Bradshaw did all the killing. Didn't wanna sign anything, but it's all on tape.”

“Hah, he talked without a lawyer?” Holden says, with a malicious grin. Only his lips move, and his expression stays bleak. “All that time in prison, I thought I’d been bested by some kind of criminal genius. It just was just… just bad luck and...” he trails off, trying to pull the smile back up. “He’s gonna get the chair, isn’t he? I mean, now that we can link him to those crimes, even if he denies specific acts, a good prosecutor will be able get a couple of first degrees. I’ll call Em and--”  
  
Bill interrupts bitterly. “You are such a piece of work. Did you not consider letting me in on your strategy? Your _partner_ in this interrogation?”  
  
“I thought the less acting you had to do the better. That genuinely outraged reaction was just superb,” Holden says, sardonic and unhappy.

“Bullshit, Holden,” Bill growls. “I’m a professional. This is you trying to get under my skin, as well as Creighton’s. You think I’m gonna want to be your _friend_ when you treat me like a fucking pawn piece? Like some slack-jawed moron to follow you around, basking in your trail of brilliance?”  
  
Holden’s smile transitions to an ugly grimace. “You don’t want to see me any more, Bill. Might as well go out with a bang.”  
  
Bill shoves him, hard. “You are, without a doubt, the shittiest person I’ve ever been friends with,” he says. “Get in the car. We gotta take this shit to Madison PD.”  
  
Holden can’t keep his mouth from a stupid gape. He stumbles back a step with the force of Bill’s push, planting a splayed hand on the car window. “ _We_ do _?_ ” 

“You think you’re getting outta it that easily? Get in the car, asshole.”  
  
There’s no comprehension from the young man. “I-- uh--”  
  
Bill narrows his eyes, thickly sarcastic. “Oh, no, Holden, _I’m sorry_. I’m so sorry to fuck up your brilliant friendship exit strategy. Did you want me to hand-hold you through your self-sabotage? Would that make you feel more in control of your clusterfuck life?”

Holden winces at the words, understanding dawning about him. His voice is rich with trembling trepidation. “You said-- you _really_ want me to come with you?”  
  
Bill gives an exaggerated eye roll. “Yeah. ...when you write this into your fucking autobiography, you better lie your ass off. Say I was in on it from the beginning. I’m not gonna feature as some incompetent, butt-of-every-joke background character.”  
  
“Of course not. You’re the hero of the story,” Holden assures him.

  _Are you joking?_ Bill can’t tell for the life of him. The same earnest blue eyes that drove that pin-prick of doubt through his cement-hard certainty, when he first visited Winnebago. _No, he’s not being a smartass. He’s fucking delusional, nothing to do with the schizophrenia._  
  
He pulls out the cigarette he’s been craving every second spent coddling Greg Creighton. He strikes his lighter, inhales a soft whisper about his lips. “Get in the car, Holden.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOd it's done. Damn, this feels sadder than I expected it to.
> 
> A huge thank you to all my readers, special shoutout to the people willing to interact with me and keep me motivated and writing. I had a lot of fun talking to people in the comment section and I hope this ending works for you! I love you all and I'm so grateful that you stuck out my 60k words of AU. Thanks for your understanding when my pace jumped around from 5 updates a week to the break I took to get the ending done and dusted. I'm so much happier with this conclusion than what I would have written in that depressed, writer's block state.


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